Literature

The Greatness of the Gatsby

May 15, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Kathryn Schulz has seized the occasion of the newest—and probably not the last—screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby to take the great American novel down several pegs. Indeed, she is not content to critique it; the title of her provocative piece is Why I Despise The Great Gatsby” (Vulture.com, 6 May 2013). Naturally, any critic, any reader, is more than entitled to his or her opinion; art is useless unless it is capable of inspiring. At its best it can inspire pleasure and awe, sympathy and thoughtfulness, but it can and must also inspire criticism, and art that lasts is able to sustain both our scrutiny and the passage of time.

As such, I have no particular qualms with Schulz, or anyone else, expressing disenchantment with a novel so many others worship. In fact, the world needs more, not less people willing or able to interrogate our literary sacred cows and offer views contrary to received and/or inculcated opinion. On the other hand, any analysis that disputes near-universal approbation must do the necessary work on its own behalf. Thus, as a statement of personal preference, I celebrate Schulz’s decision—however opportunistic—to declare her disdain; it’s where she attempts to engage with the novel as a critic that I have reservations, and comments. More, she claims a conspiracy of sorts where we are “not free to dislike this book”. Of course we are; but if we are going to put pen to paper in the service of condemning it, we’d better have insights that are compelling and not clichéd.

First of all, I can usually tell where people are coming from when they assail The Great Gatsby. They are invariably similar to folks who, striking a rebellious or recalcitrant pose, dismiss Shakespeare as overrated or impossible to appreciate. Of course, all too often it becomes disappointingly obvious that many of these people have failed to read many (or any) of the works in question. Of course this scenario applies to many canonical works, whether we’re talking about Mozart, Miles Davis or (sigh) Herman Melville. The reason I associate naysayers of The Great Gatsby with Shakespeare deniers is because they frequently make the facile and irritating mistake of approaching older works from a current perspective.

To be certain, one of the reasons an eminent work (like The Great Gatsby) appeals to successive generations is its ability to depict truths that cut across time and trends. Ironically, it’s precisely the ways F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece remains relevant—and revelatory—that offer its best account for posterity. The fact that the action occurs in definite times and places which, at least on superficial levels, seem obsolete, only augments the novel’s import and prescience.

Whenever someone complains about the obviousness or unoriginality of either Shakespeare or Fitzgerald, I am obliged to remind them that the reason their words and symbols seem so readymade is because so many lesser authors have imitated or copied them. Aside from the fact that virtually any of Shakespeare’s mature works and The Great Gatsby can be savored on a line-by-line basis solely for the richness of their language, it’s almost impossible to imagine contemporary writing outside the large shadow they cast. Anytime a symbol from an older work (like, say, Hamlet or Moby Dick) seems hackneyed there’s a good chance it’s because the symbol in question has become such an inextricable part of our culture. Sound pretentious? Think about what the expression “white whale” signifies, or the ways “to be or not to be—that is the question” has been quoted or placed in diverse contexts. Put another way, it’s not the fault of the author if their words have become ubiquitous, and it’s both unfair and inaccurate to damn the work by comparison with the unoriginal or overused ways it is exploited—or abused—by its acolytes.

I’m accustomed to hearing people protest (too much) about the symbolism in The Great Gatsby, but Schulz levels two complaints that I’m not sure I’ve heard associated with this particular book, and I think, as is normally the case, they reveal more about her than Fitzgerald’s prose. The first is that the characters are unlikable, a quibble I’d expect from a college sophomore or someone who reads books about reality TV stars. Now, to be clear, some of our better scribes have been able to render terrible people as both amusing and endearing. This is something Martin Amis has practically made a career out of, nowhere more successfully than in his masterpiece Money. But who needs or wants to like all the characters in a work of fiction?

Complaining about the novel she wished Fitzgerald had written, Schulz complains “Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable.” It is, presumably, a given that both Tom and Daisy are supposed to be unsympathetic (for my money they are, to Fitzgerald’s considerable credit, portrayed as two of the most despicable characters in all literature). But let’s take a look at the primary players for whom Schulz can summon neither love nor hate. In a book (the book) delineating shallow, misguided and spiritually hollow people, Schulz can’t fathom why Fitzgerald would create such…shallow, misguided and spiritually hollow people! One scarcely knows where to begin, but I’ll take a shot.

As narrator (reliable? What can we take from the fact that he is writing this, years and miles removed from the events being depicted, safe, chastened, dissatisfied, maybe a tad sentimental, still, for the things that might have been had Gatsby been just a little bit greater?), Nick is not supposed to be especially likable. In fact, he’s supposed to be exactly what he is: a passive, voyeuristic coward; the guy who silently goes along with everyone and everything even though he—as the less-than-reliable narration would have us believe—knew better. Here is Schulz’s assessment: “At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit. Our position throughout is that of an innocent bystander. That’s also Nick’s role, so the perspective of the book becomes one of passive observation…Yet he never admits to collusion with or seduction by all the fabulous depravity around him. After it’s all over, he retreats to the Midwest and, figuratively and literally, tells his story from the safe remove of America’s imaginary moral high ground.” Does it occur to Schulz that part of Nick’s unspoken story is the possibility that, had Gatsby not been killed, he would have contentedly continued to lick his rich benefactor’s boot heels? Perhaps Schulz also suspects that in Poe’s tale Amontillado is the bad guy, or that Marlow is just as culpable as Mr. Kurtz, because he kind of sat around and watched the evil unfold?

Along these lines, Schulz commits the most egregious, and embarrassingly shallow of sins: conflating Nick as narrator with Fitzgerald as actual person. Granted, this type of insouciant psychoanalysis is practically de rigueur in today’s literary scene (including most college English departments), but it not only undermines the point(s) Schulz attempts to make, it leaves them difficult to take seriously. Worse, she hones in on what she believes exposes Fitzgerald’s ultimate character flaw: the fact that he struggled with his contempt for the wealthy and his ambition to be well-off. Gee, sound like anyone you know?

Perhaps, just to take one glaring example, a certain demographic in our country that consistently votes against its best interest, enabling taxes on the wealthiest fraction to shrivel because of the infinitesimal chance they, too, might one day be flush? As F. Scott Fitzgerald puts it, knocking it out of the park better than anyone not named H.L. Mencken: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” It’s what the novel says about those who are not wealthy that comprises the dark heart of its wonder—and acumen—and anyone failing to see the flappers and fools providing their gin are so much expensive scenery misses the entire point.

Schulz also laments that she can’t find sufficient reason to believe in Gatsby’s love for Daisy (indeed, she can’t believe in Gatsby and Daisy, period). I find this incredible: how can anyone read this novel and not understand Gatsby’s love for Daisy is unbelievable, in part because it is unfeasible; it is, in fact, impossible—an illusion. Like so many could-have-been-a-contender parables, he snatched at his brass ring (erected his Xanadu, etc.), and found, to his chagrin, it was not sustainable. And all that business about “You can’t repeat the past?” Hint: Nick (and/or Fitzgerald) is not just talking about Gatsby there; he’s talking about all of us, and understanding this puts the entire narrative in sharp, devastating focus. The tragedy of the novel is, ultimately, not a bunch of incurious, brutal people behaving badly; it’s that everyone, affluent or indigent, has a human desire to get more than they’ll receive, and an instinctive awareness they get less attractive, healthy and proficient after exceeding a certain age.

Once again, Schulz laments Fitzgerald’s inability to write the book she would have felt more comfortable reading, underscoring how grievously she is missing the mark: “On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy.” On the contrary; what Fitzgerald does, with these ostensibly soulless and unpleasant people, is interrogate cause and effect, motive and aftermath, and all aspects of that myth sold to us as the American Dream. He takes this construction and places it on the operating table, dissecting what causes it to breathe, thrive and rot from the inside out. In this single regard, Fitzgerald was more prophetic than his critics can comprehend: he predicted how the roaring ‘20s would end and be remembered before they expired. If the people (like Nick) who wind up on the outside looking in see nothing but emptiness, it’s because all vanity, in the end, returns to the ashes whence it sprang. Fitzgerald is not describing anything Ecclesiastes did not say first, if less poetically.

In addition, he depicted the way Americans would react to every calamity of the 20th Century: after each debacle, the architects of said crisis waltz away, licking their wounds and counting their cash. No amount of dour intuition could have prepared Fitzgerald to imagine that, in the 21st century, they also get paid to scold the complicit masses (receiving book deals, going into politics or appearing on TV—the lucky ones doing all three). Think about the cowards in Congress today, who lustily passed legislation (and deregulation) that hastened the latest crash, now pushing austerity (but not higher taxes!). It isn’t that their methods or strategies are predictable (they are), it’s the narrative they employ that is so quintessentially American: cynicism covered in money, preaching solidarity.

In one of the most quoted passages of the book, Tom and Daisy are described as “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” One need look no further than Wall Street, or Iraq, or the budgetary realities of a small town under sequestration to see, even with eyes wide shut, the ways everything Fitzgerald held his mirror up to are reflecting back at us, bigger, uglier and more shameless than they ever were a century ago. In America it is not only romance and nostalgia that ensure we are borne, ceaselessly to the past.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/171337-the-greatness-of-the-gatsby/

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Charles Mingus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Girl Of My Dreams, Kathryn Schulz, Martin Amis, Popmatters, The Great Gatsby

They Lived This Way Because No One Else Could (Revisited)

March 22, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Everyone has their favorite picture.

I can’t say this one is mine, but it will do.

Even though I was always too young to fully (or even partially) feel the impact of Elizabeth Taylor, I was aware of greatness and beauty on an epic scale when I saw it. She was already considered “over the hill” by the time I came of age, but that is not the point: that’s what movies and pictures are for. She was rich and famous and endlessly discussed, but acting and antics aside, she was revered above all for her pulchritude.

It’s interesting, sort of, that she was so closely associated with Michael Jackson for a time, because both of them were once-in-a-century type tri-fectas in terms of talent, influence and societal psychoanalysis. And, like him, she had (for understandable as well as self-inflicted reasons) fallen so far from her exalted perch she –even more so than MJ– began being discussed in the past tense even while she lived. While this is obviously an unflattering insight for the way we regard and treat our heroes once they cease to thrill or enthrall us, it is also a unique, if perverse compliment. Only those who have been elevated to such an extent can fall so far. And at the end of the day, much of the fodder for our chattering classes is predicated on a grudging acknowledgment that few of us will ever comprehend what it’s like to be immortal. Not many people are able to matter once they’ve been gone and time, as we always see, is eager to put sand in the eyes of future generations. It is quite safe to suggest Taylor will endure as a distinctly American figure who mattered: her best days came closest to our collective ideal that they make her name an adjective as well as a noun.

Taylor has died, which makes it official. I can’t imagine I am the only one who may have forgotten that she was still alive.

As far as appraising her film career and cultural impact, I’m content to let those who lived through it all have their say. It’s not that I have nothing; indeed, I’ve already said more than I figured I would.

It is, therefore, with the same sense of awe that I revisit a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago, discussing Taylor and the men she made history with (the section specifically relating to Taylor is directly below –and it’s worth checking out just to see Richard Burton’s sublime summation of her special gifts).

4/1/2010:

(Personal note: this book will be a required purchase for anyone who has ever been fascinated by Burton’s relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. I must confess, I’ve never cared much about it, or her, but could not help but be amused, and startled, to discover that in her prime she could drink just about any other human being under the table. “I had a hollow leg (in those days)…my capacity was terrifying,” she recalls. So they had that little hobby in common, but it was definitely Liz’s looks that put the hook in Burton. “Burton referred to Taylor’s tits as ‘Apocalyptic. They would topple empires before they withered.’” Let’s stop and savor that for a second: there are novelists whose collected works don’t contain a line that perfect. Inevitably, both Burton and Taylor withered, and it was from the inside out. Anyone who was born between 1970 and 1980 can recall seeing these two on TV (or in a movie) and thinking “What’s all the fuss about?” and having their parents quickly set them straight. In their primes they were arguably the brightest and most beautiful stars in the Hollywood galaxy. But wither they did, and it was an expensive, languid, and hard-earned degeneration. With Burton, it wasn’t a matter of how much he consumed, but how he managed to find time to eat or sleep or breathe. On a given day he might plow through three full fifths of vodka. I’m not certain I’ve had that many martinis in my life. All of which is to say, of the four, Burton is generally considered the one who had the most to give and gave the most away as a result of his addictions –which either prompted or exacerbated a lethargy and greediness that devoured entirely too much of his energy and ability. More than a few notable folks offered the opinion that had Burton exerted a bit more control over his vices he may have ultimately become the most revered stage actor of all time, surpassing even Olivier.)

My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!

That is from Mark Twain, a man who talked the talk, walked the walk, drank the drank and, for good measure, smoked the smoke. This was the famous quote that kept running through my mind like a mantra, or a rallying cry, as I read the trashy, sensationalistic, poorly written masterpiece by Robert Sellers entitled Hellraisers. The full title is Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed. To be frank, and anyone who knows even a little about any of these icons, the book could have focused on just one of them and had more than enough material to fill a volume. That it is crammed with (outrageous) stories involving all four of them is almost too much of a bad thing (bad meaning good but also meaning awful). What follows is not a review so much as a celebration.

I read this book in short, ecstatic snippets over the course of the past month. If you are the type of person who buys toilet books (does anyone buy toilet books?), this one is an automatic addition to your potty arsenal. Me, I was reading it before bedtime and while the laugh-out-louds were frequent, I invariably got drunk enough from the contact buzz to pass out after a few pages.

I think this book can be properly appreciated as a document of (cliche alert!) a truly different era. These types of artists simply don’t exist anymore and, to be honest, they could not possibly exist. I’m not necessarily implying that contemporary cinema will suffer for it, but these days (as Richard Harris points out) Tom Cruise shows up at a screening with a bottle of Evian while Harris and his compatriots would turn up, with neither irony nor a compulsion to impress, sporting a bottle of scotch. Is our society, or our silver screen, unduly affected by this passing of the gourd? Who knows. And who cares.

One thing that is certain: celebrities today are unhealthily obsessed with their status. Their capacity for sensation is a business decision, often engineered by PR hacks, or else enacted electronically: a tweet here and an interview there, all safely behind the glass. Could you imagine having a pint with just about any Hollywood A-lister? Of course you couldn’t. The fact of the matter was, these four rapscallions were (cliche alert!) men of the people, and by word –and more significantly, by deed– they were both entirely at ease and happiest when they were surrounded by the so-called common folk. Even though each of them was extraordinary in his own way(s), all of them came from difficult or at least potentially unpromising origins: they knew how little separated them from the coalminers they came up with, and how fortunate they were getting paid to pretend as opposed to breaking their backs in a factory.

And, (cliche alert!) talk about keeping it real. These chaps threw back pints and threw around their fists because they wanted to and, to a certain extent, they had to. Here’s an instructive anecdote: On a visit to Rome Harris persuaded one of the film executives to join him in order to witness first hand that it wasn’t always the actor who started all the brawling. On their first night they went to a bar and listened as a drunken American tourist spelt out in a loud voice how he was going to do in Harris. The executive advised his client to take no notice. “Do you want me to wait until I get a bottle across the face,” reasoned Harris, “or go in and get it over with.” The executive could see only logic in this statement and Harris took the insulting Yank outside and flattened him.

Here’s the thing. That’s not old school; that is one room and no electricity school. And while I’m not endorsing or advocating a top tier artist (or any average citizen) employing violence to settle their disputes, there is something almost refreshing (not quite quaint, but close) in this mano a mano arithmetic. Consider that, and compare it to our contemporary film, rock, and especially rap superstars with their posses, guns and melodramatic beefs. Drive-bys and group beatings? How about this: Got a problem? Let’s squash it right here, right now, without weapons or a crew of thugs jumping in.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting that these paleolithic antics didn’t have deleterious effects on their lives, as well as their art. Did we get the best they had to give? The verdict on all four (particularly Burton) is quite clearly nay. But would we otherwise have gotten This Sporting Life? Could we ever conceive Lawrence of Arabia? (It’s commonly agreed that O’Toole’s work here is among the best in movie history, but it may not be as well known that the almost impossibly elegant actor was hearty enough to endure an excruciating desert shoot that would have crippled many other thespians.)

Did each of them forfeit the best years of their artistic (not to mention actual) lives to drinking and skylarking? Perhaps, although it depends upon one’s definition of what entails a life best lived, and that is fodder for another discussion altogether. Based on the anecdotes and testimonials contained within these pages, not a single one of them regretted leading such unabashed existences (even if none of them could recall large chunks of those lives due to the state they were often in).

Let’s look at The Tale of the Tape (taken directly from the book).

Exhibit A, Richard Harris:

- One night Harris was thrown out of a pub at closing time, but still in need of a drink boarded a train just to make use of its open bar. With no idea where the train was headed he arrived in Leeds completely (inebriated) at one in the morning. With nowhere to go he walked down a nearby street and seeing a light on in a house chucked a stone at the window. The owner came storming out but upon recognizing Harris invited the star inside. Harris stayed there for four whole days and wasn’t sober once. Eventually the man’s wife phoned (Harris’s wife): “I’ve got your husband.” She was shocked when (Harris’s wife) replied, “Good, keep him.”

- In his favorite New York bar the bartender would see Harris walking in and immediately line up six double vodkas.

- At home in the Bahamas neighbors took to dropping by uninvited. To deter them Harris conceived an impish plot. One afternoon a family living close by turned up. Walking inside they found Harris with two mates sitting naked watching porno movies and masturbating. “Oh, hello there,” said Harris. “Come on in.” The incident went round the island like all good gossip does and afterwards Harris was left pretty much in peace; the way he wanted it.

- “When they took him away to hospital (shortly before his death)”, recalls director Peter Medak, “the lobby just completely stopped, and Richard sat up on the stretcher and turned back to the whole foyer and shouted, ‘It was the food! Don’t touch the food!’ That was typical Richard.”

(Personal note: just looking at the various interviews and clips on YouTube reveal without any doubt that Harris was a master storyteller and what we used to without irony call a bon vivant. He is a pub legend and if he did little else in his long life than bring amusement and joy to the thousands of people fortunate enough to have their eyes, ears and beers in his vicinity, it was a great deal more than most human beings are capable of imparting. Of course he did much more than that and he will endure as one of the genuine characters of the 20th Century.)

Exhibit B, Richard Burton:

- During one particular scene (in 1966′s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) Burton was required to down a whiskey. The props department brought in flat ginger ale, the movies’ usual substitute for scotch, but Burton waved it away. “It’s only a short scene, won’t need more than a couple of takes. Bring me some real whiskey.” In fact the scene needed 47 takes. “Imagine it, luv,” Burton bragged to a journalist later, “47 whiskies!”

- Burton had arrived to work on The Klansmen drunk and stayed drunk throughout filming, consuming three bottles of vodka a day, a routine he’d been following for the past six months…when (the director) was filming Burton’s death scene he complimented the make-up man. “You’ve done a great job.” The make-up man replied, “I haven’t touched him.”

- Staggering home at three in the morning, O’Toole tried to carry (Burton)…and both men stumbled into the gutter. Somebody stopped beside them on the pavement. It was Alan Bates, O’Toole’s ex RADA colleague. “Peter,” he said, “today I’ve just signed up for my first commercial picture.” “We both looked up,” recalled O’Toole, and said “You coming down to join us, then?”

Exhibit C, Oliver Reed:

(Personal note: I have a special place in my heart for Ollie. I couldn’t have been more than ten the first time I saw the musical Oliver! and Reed, as Bill Sikes, scared the living shit out of me. He was the real deal: the kind of face you could smash a torch into, break a bottle on and pour hot oil over and he’d smile…before he killed you. I then enjoyed him as the perfectly cast father in the movie version of Tommy. He was (cliche alert!!) absolutely one of those rare actors who, for me, I’d watch in virtually anything he did just because he had that presence: he loved the camera and the camera bloody loved him. That he ended up dying, in a bar, after drunkenly arm wrestling with a group of sailors four decades younger was…pathetic, predictable, perfect.)

- In an early role (as a werewolf, in a wretched B-movie), Reed enjoyed keeping his make-up on at the end of the day and terrifying fellow motorists at traffic lights.

- After Tommy Reed and The Who’s Keith Moon continued their rabble-rousing friendship. Reed enjoyed a game that he christened “head butting”. Each player was required to smash his head against his opponent until one collapsed or surrendered. A regular victim was (The Who’s bass player) John Entwistle, who, after being knocked out three times, pleaded with the nightclub owner to either ban the game or ban Ollie.

- Filming The Great Question (1983) Reed was stuck in Iraq…in what was essentially a war zone. One night Reed joined the crew for numerous drinks in the hotel bar and, looking in the nearby restaurant, saw a Texas oil billionaire whom he knew. Jumping up, obviously drunk as a skunk, he rushed upstairs to his room. “When he came back down he was wearing a western shirt and cowboy boots and walked John Wayne style into the restaurant to see his buddy,” recalls stunt man Vic Armstrong. “Inside he gave this guy a Texas handshake, as he called it, which basically means lifting your leg up and smashing your cowboy boot down on the table. So Ollie walked up to this guy’s table, surrounded by women and other dignitaries, and smash, all the cutlery and glass went flying in the air. Suddenly Ollie looked at the guy and it wasn’t his mate at all, it was some Arab with his harem, deeply offended that this westerner had come stamping on his table and upsetting everything.

- Reed had his private parts (which he was fond of calling his “mighty mallet”) emblazoned with the images of two eagle’s claws. Not long after, he had an eagle’s head tattooed on his shoulder, so when people asked why he had an eagle’s head on his shoulder he could reply, “Would you like to see where it’s perched?”

Exhibit D, Peter O’Toole:

(Personal note: after reading this book I’m more convinced than ever that if I could come back as another person and experience their life, Peter O’Toole would be on the very short list.)

- Interviewer: “Are you afraid of dying?” O’Toole: “Petrified.” Interviewer: “Why?” O’Toole: “Because there’s no future in it.” Interviewer: “When did you last think you were about to die?” O’Toole: “About four o’clock this morning.”

- O’Toole once arrived late for a ferry back to Ireland, the gangplank having just been raised. When the captain refused him entry O’Toole seized the ship’s papers, without which it couldn’t sail. He was only persuaded to hand them over by the arrival of a policeman. O’Toole then chartered a plane to Dublin, hired a taxi upon landing and raced from the airport to the harbour. When the ferry arrived there was O’Toole waiting on the dock to challenge the officer to a fistfight.

- O’Toole had never been the most subtle of people and old age hardly dented his un-PC ways. He had little time for the current crop of British stars like Hugh Grant. “Ugh, that twitching idiot! Ooh, I musn’t say that, must I, but he’s just a floppy young stammerer in all his films.” (Personal note: HaHaHaHa!)

- At the 2002 Oscars, O’Toole was to receive a lifetime achievement award. However, on discovering the bar served no alcohol, he threatened to walk out. Panicked producers had some vodka smuggled in.

In the final analysis, these men were geniuses on the screen, and depending upon how one judges such things, geniuses off it as well. One could maintain that, like Oscar Wilde, they were equally geniuses at life: they lived life fully on their own terms, and after all the broken glass, bludgeoned livers, wrecked relationships, wounded feelings and untapped potential, the sum shined brighter than the bits and pieces. Were they running away from their demons even as they rushed, face first, into a mirror or bar brawl or oncoming vehicle? Perhaps. But there was a courageousness to their conviction and intolerance for half-measures that, for better or worse, we’ll seldom if ever see again. They lived the lives they led because they had no choice, and more to the point, because nobody else could.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, Oliver Reed, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Richard Harris

Coal Mines, Unions, Big Business and (of course) George Orwell (Revisited)

February 27, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. –George Orwell

Quite by chance (no, really), I saw an old classic that had been languishing in my Netflix queue: like St. Peter allowing a purgatoried soul into heaven, I finally brought it to metaphorical salvation via my DVD player. I remember reading about it last year when I was devouring Hellraisers, the almost literally unbelievable account of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris and their myriad escapades which can only be described as epic. The idea of Harris sharing screen space with Sean Connery was, suffice it to say, enticing. The movie in question, The Molly Maguires, did not do well upon its release and has become something of a cult classic –with an emphasis on the cult.

The story, in a nutshell, involves the gruesome exploitation suffered by Irish immigrants (and workers in general including, of course, young children because this was before Teddy Roosevelt, horrified by the depictions in books like Sinclair’s The Jungle, got inspired to seize some manner of control from Big Business and introduce those quaint concepts of regulation and workers’ rights: in other words, this story takes place precisely in the era that today’s GOP is aggressively working behind the scenes to bring us back to) toiling for paltry pay in the coal mines. If you are imagining an environment where safety was tenuous and the conditions were barbaric, at best, you are not incorrect. It is also a workplace where the owners controlled everything, including the breaks not given and the payment not rendered. In one illuminating scene the new employee (Harris) stands in line to get his weekly wages: the boss adds up the coal collected and announces the amount; Harris smiles. Then the boss subtracts the damaged tools, the wear-and-tear (a 19th C. version of “adminstrative fees”) and the final amount is reduced from nine bucks and change to just change. As Harris stands in disbelief the boss, flanked on either side by police officers, glowers at him and says “Next!” If that sounds too much like a bad out-take from It’s A Wonderful Life, check yourself: these are the conditions that absolutely existed, as men like Sinclair (and later, George Orwell –just to name two of the more famous and important examples) observed and reported.

The reason the movie was probably unsuccessful, and the reason the timing of my first viewing is serendipitous, is because of the subject matter: way before unions existed, circumstances were sufficiently dire that the use of drastic measures were required, and understandable. As a result, a group of protestors (or terrorists, depending on what century you live in and what newspapers you read) took to undermining the mine’s profitability by using incendiary tactics, literally. Harris, the “good guy” is a paid detective assigned to infiltrate this mob and help the honchos crush the uprising by killing the culprits. If this sounds a bit familiar, the story is based in large part on true events inspired by the reprehensible actions of the Pinkertons, who operated kind of like union busters before unions existed.

The movie is clever: by making Connery grim and uncharismatic (no mean feat considering this is Mr. Shaken, Not Stirred we are talking about) and playing up Harris’s roguish charm (yes–that is a cliche but if anyone could ever be said to possess roguish charm it’s the ever-ebullient but burly Harris), the viewer is almost conned into empathizing with, and rooting for the putative protagonist. Only after the film concludes does it finally –and fully– occur to the viewer: if the movie had been shot, or written differently we would be pulling for the “bad guys” all along. And that is the point. If the movie was told from the alternate point of view, it would have been preachy, unconvincing and free of emotional conflict. Which is exactly why it’s a good movie and most likely why it did not set the box office on fire. It also might make one recall the other chestnut (speaking of cliches) about history being written by the victors, the power of language to shape story and the mechanisms always at work to manufacture how reality is perceived.

I’m not certain if it has anything to do with what you study in college, or the type of person you already are (of course the two are not mutually exclusive by any means) but speaking for myself, I suspect that if you are a certain age and not already convinced that God is White and the GOP is Right (and anyone under the age of twenty-one who is certain of either of those things is already a lost cause, intellectually and morally), reading a book like The Road To Wigan Pier changes you. Reading a book like The Jungle changes you. Books like Madame Bovary change you. Books like The Second Sex change you. Books like Notes From Underground change you. Books like Invisible Man change you. Then you might start reading poetry and come to appreciate what William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” These works alter your perception of the big picture: cause and effect, agency vs. incapacity and history vs. ideology.

Put another way, even if you are open-minded and receptive to various sources of information, if your studies focus on economics, business or political science you are already being inculcated into an established way of thinking. Liberal arts education, if it has anything going for it (and it has plenty, thank you very little), reinforces and insists upon what Milan Kundera called a “furious nonidentification”. This does not mean to imply that all, or most, or even some of the students who embrace (or ascomb from) the ivory tower remain inquisitive and objective. It does mean that reading works from different cultures and different times inevitably denotes truths and facts (even if couched in fictional narratives) that are outside of time and agenda.

It is, therefore, easier then to make connections between Irish immigrants who worked the coal mines in Pennsylvania and Lithuanian immigrants who worked in the meatpacking plants in Chicago (Jurgis Rudkus, anyone?) and Mexican immigrants –especially the illegal ones– who labor in sweltering kitchens and frigid fields all across our country. It is impossible not to put human faces and real feelings alongside this suffering and start connecting the dots that define how exploitation works. All of a sudden, it’s less easy to espouse the impartial axioms of the Free Market and the immutable forces of commerce or especially the notion that (in America anyway) everyone starts out at the same place and those that work hard enough and say their prayers and drink their milk will attain vast fortunes without breaking laws, stepping on innocent faces and engaging in the oppressive pas de deux with Power (and the puny but influential people who possess it). Then, presumably, it goes from being merely disconcerting to outrageous that the weasels of Wall Street are back in business with billion dollar bonuses (thanks tax-payers!) and unionized public school teacher pensions are being blamed for America’s current deficits.

Which, in turn, brings us to Wisconsin and what is really at stake right now. First, before any discussion of current events can occur, one feels obliged to give serious props to Republicans: over the last few decades while they have dabbled in the vicarious thrill of foreign occupations and the odious gutter-dwelling of racial and sexual identity politicking, the cretins behind the curtain have focused on a handful of tactical battles in which they have more or less achieved their ends. For one, propagating the repeatedly disproven mantra –to the extent that it is literally taken as gospel– that any taxes at any time are always a deplorable idea.

The second is that the mainstream media has a liberal bias (they succeeded so thoroughly in this that once first-rate newspapers like The Washington Post now police their content so obsessively as to render them supine: their Op-Ed page is now dominated by whacked-out True Believers who would have been laughed out of conservative circles twenty years ago, back in the days when Bob Dole and his minions were devising health care reform that is now considered socialism).

The third is that government does not work: this is a neat trick in which, when they take power, they spend their time ensuring that this assertion is true, all while consistently expanding the size of government along with the size of the debt. Then, like clockwork, once the people have finally seen enough, a Democrat comes in to clean up the mess and they immediately become small-government deficit hawks. If I was a Democrat operative I would have Cheney’s infamous “deficits don’t matter” comment in multiple TV ads and viral videos. And I would definitely ensure that the first talking point would involve inquiring the suddenly chaste and sober program slashers like Boehner and Cantor (and all of the Tea Party fanatics, for that matter) where exactly they were during the years 2000-2008.

Finally (for now), with much assistance from an increasingly reckless, ambitious and soulless Democratic party, the demonization of unions has been a long work-in-progress. It’s funny, because as much ink has been spilled this week, it’s a perfect representation of all that has gone wrong for the so-called progressive cause that any of this hand-wringing and negotiation was necessary at all. An outstanding –and exhaustive– overview of how this came to be is available, courtesy of Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones: the piece is (perfectly) entitled “Plutocracy Now” and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The gist of his argument is that, during the last half-century (but with a vengeance beginning in the ’70s), as unions lost influence the Democrats simultaneously abandoned them as they courted wealthy financiers to fund their increasingly lavish campaign expenses.

What has long befuddled me is that, even if you can cynically concede that even Dems tred lightly before their corporate masters these days, it makes political sense to maintain a healthy relationship with unions. During the Tea Party shenanigans in ’09, I kept asking myself: when is our aloof and clueless commander-in-chief going to start reminding people that this big bad government has historically been the bulwark between the people and an Industrial Revolution lifestyle? Does it need to actually get to the point where the Republican Party literally says “let them eat cake” before people start to realize wages are stagnating, prices are rising and the only people getting fat are the wealthiest .01% (and Mama Cass)? Apparently it does. But even if the seemingly easy battle to prove the relative benevolence of government (or compassionate conservatism–ha!) is a non-starter in 2011, it should not require too much PowerPoint proficiency to compile a quick commentary about what unions have wrought: minimum wage, forty-hour work week, health insurance, pensions, vacations, sick-leave, etc. All of the things people assume exist in a vacuum, or were always just sort of there; or best of all, were the inevitable rewards of laissez-faire philosophy until big government came along and screwed everything up.

In any event, we could –and in different circumstances, should– spend a considerable amount of time bemoaning the myopia and apathy that led to what transpired in November (and the still-egregious and unacceptable capitulation of the tax increase in December), but the time may at long last be ripe for some sort of reckoning. If there was any doubt about what that imbecile Scott Walker is up to, and what naked partisan interests he wholly represents, yesterday’s embarrassing, enlightening prank call should sufficiently remove any uncertainty. People are finally waking up and seeing what is at stake (today collective bargaining; tomorrow social security!). Hopefully there is sufficient momentum to at least enable the marble-mouthed Democrats to cobble together some cohesive messaging. One would think the mere act of pointing out the truth would not require heavy-lifting and soul-searching (but those without souls, admittedly, can have difficulty here). Again, I do not count on any of these center-left pols to suddenly find religion, so to speak, but presumably they can grasp that there is a purely political advantage to being on the right side of the middle class, not to mention history.

Filed Under: Film, Literature, Myself When I'm Real, Politics Tagged With: Charley Patton, George Orwell, I Shall Not Be Moved, Johnny Cash, Kevin Drum, Milan Kundera, Richard Harris, Sean Connery, The Molly Maguires, The Pinkertons, The Road To Wigan Pier, Wisconsin

Art vs. Life and Death, Again (Revisited)

February 12, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

We were saying?

Wow, look at the New York Times, today, on the complicated legacy of Roberto Bolano, here.

Money quote(s):

Few writers are more acclaimed right now than the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, who died of an unspecified liver ailment in 2003, at the age of 50. His posthumous novel, 2666, appeared on many lists of the best books of 2008, and interest in him and his work has been further kindled by his growing reputation as a hard-living literary outlaw…At the same time, some of Mr. Bolaño’s friends in Mexico, where he lived for nearly a decade before finally settling down near Barcelona, Spain, are questioning another aspect of the life story he constructed for himself…Regarding Mr. Bolaño and drugs, numerous Latin American and European critics and bloggers have taken the side of his widow, accusing American critics and publishers of deliberately distorting the writer’s past to fit him into the familiar mold of the tortured artist.

This, as they say, is a propos. Where my previous post focused more on the ways in which critics (and fans) have their own reasons (sometime legitimate, often selfish) for propagating the romanticized image of the decadent artist, there is no question that some artists are very invested in their own mythologizing. I was more concerned with the idea of the posers who are probably not artists at all (i.e., the ones who will corner you at a party and talk, endlessly, about all the projects they’ll get around to working on, someday), but of course there are the ones, ranging from obscure (James Frey) to already established (Bolano) fabricating an entire autobiography based on a deliberate embellishment. Or, to put it more bluntly, a lie. And this could warrant considerable examination, but I think the bottom line is, it’s a mutually rewarding endeavor for writer and publisher/editor when this sham works. It creates the dangerous aura the writer can cultivate to generate interest (and sales) and it creates a buzz about the writer, which generates sales (and interest in future books). The blame game–so typically American–only commences when the author’s work (or bio) is definitively exposed as fiction (see: James Frey) and you have editors scrambling to cover their asses (or idiots like Oprah Winfrey who, personifying the prurient American reader who is taken hook line and sinker by the outrageous, over-the-top exploits of the bad-ass artist, shifts from huckster to soap-box admonisher overnight, just to save face). This is a tricky dance: some editors are genuinely duped, some are simply disingenuous, and find that their usually infallible bullshit detectors tend to malfunction at the first promise of a potential best-seller. The agents, editors and publishers who are shocked to discover that they were taken tend to protest too much.

But in the final analysis, despite how despicable and petty the business side of publishing is, once the silk curtain is pulled back, the fact that artists lie (or feel it’s a good business decision to lie) and publishers turn a blind eye says more about the collective audience who sits back and laps it up.

If you are going to create your own persona, at least do it transparently, and with some measure of self-deprecating humor. And, always, elan. Like Donald Fagen did with his immortal, tongue-in-cheek ode to aggrandizement, Deacon Blues. But then, he really was a rock star.

You call me a fool
You say it’s a crazy scheme
This one’s for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I’ll make it this time
I’m ready to cross that fine line
I’ll learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
And I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Deacon Blues, Donald Fagen, James Frey, Oprah, Roberto Bolano, Steely Dan

Art vs. Life and Death, cont’d (Revisited)

February 11, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Here’s the thing: one wonders how many of these artistic types are producing anything worthwhile? How many worthwhile artists do you run into who are even comfortable talking about the fact that they create? It’s certainly a generalization, but in my experience, those who talk much, do little (that’s actually true of just about any endeavor, but it seems almost axiomatic when it comes to artistic inclination). It would be amusing to make a documentary entitled “The writer at work”, and the camera pans in on some dude in his boxers and dirty t-shirt, sitting on the floor with a legal pad, rubbing his cheeks and shaking his head, staring at a blank legal pad. Moments pass…silence. WAIT! He is writing….he stops. Rubs his cheek; shakes his head. Crosses out what he wrote. Moments pass. Silence. After 90 minutes the words “To be continued” flash on the screen. It would be the most insufferably boring, but true documentary ever created–and it would disabuse countless dreamers and posers of the notion that being a writer is something you can cultivate or assume, the way you can learn a foreign language by being immersed in another culture.

Martin Amis: a writer who can write about writing

But lest you think–understandably–that I wish to put the bulk of the blame on critics and article writing assistant professors, let’s acknowledge an immutable fact: these prurient tell-all tomes would not continue to be written if they did not consistently sell. So the onus is…on us. Seriously. The collective “we” are increasingly more familiar with the lives of the writers than the words they wrote. And this distressing tendency is at its apex (or nadir) right now, with the reality TV bonanza. Lest that sound like whining, or tilting at the inexorable windmills of commerce, I recognize it, I accept it, and I try not to worry about it. It’s not like America has suddenly retarded its collective ability (or desire) to think and read and engage. Or, if it has, it’s a very slow erosion and each generation has predictably lamented the idiocy of the age it currently suffers through. Same as it ever was.

I’d say that with some notable exceptions, I tend to be most fully satisfied reading criticism of writing done by writers (particularly fiction writers) and while it’s more rare, reading about music by people who make music tends to maintain the balance between insight and expertise. Put more cynically, everyone puts pen to paper with an agenda. No artist worth a damn would begrudge any honest reader their right to interpret the work as they see (and experience) it. Some critics mean well and just can’t manage to convince; some critics mean ill but can’t help being brilliant. Ultimately, it’s only when someone comes to the table with an agenda, but happens to be ignorant, that a disservice is done to the art being commented upon.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Martin Amis, Mishima, Philip Glass, Sylvia Plath

Art vs. Life and Death (Revisited)

February 10, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Subj: art

Date: 11/28/98 12:55:40 PM Eastern Standard Time

From: BULLMURPH

To: BULLMURPH

Question: If artists are inherently not normal, but the goal of analysis is more or less to overcome abnormalities, is treatment of psychological problems likely to inhibit the subjects’ creativity?

Answer: I don’t know.

This is a fascinating conundrum.

(Something only artists are interested in? I don’t think so. Particularly since books about writer’s lives sell better than the books the artists wrote. The more sensational the life (or death), the more popular the book. As always, this says a great deal more about contemporary readers than writers.)

I think more often than not the artist who gets “help”, whether it’s from medication or analysis (or both) is able to retain the creativity but concurrently enhance productivity. This is significant, and in many ways a best case scenario, not only for the writer, but the family and friends whose lives are invariably made more challenging through their association with a troubled artist. Have we, at long last, finally debunked the romanticized notion of the disenchanted individual (see: tortured artist) churning out masterworks in spite of, or because of, their affliction? This has been an especially egregious construction of lit-crit vampires and prurient pundits, most of whom have no actual insight regarding the association between creativity and mental illness. Hence, we get academic treatises depicting the requisite “abnormal” consciousness that compels creation. It isn’t so much that this is wrong, although it does smack of the worst tendencies of aloof and austere thinking so prevelant in the academy and the church. It is at once condescending and patronizing, in ways ceaselessly unique to tenured professors and clergymen.

Nevertheless, many artists are inspired to create because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with reality and how it is defined, and/or perceived by the masses (is there a better way to say this? The average folks? The normal folks? The consumers? The quietly desperate?). It is rather well documented, often by the artists themselves, that a Van Gogh or a Woolf or a Hemingway would produce in the manic frenzies that either followed or preceded the excruciating lows, or, more often, during the focused, methodical industry of a mere mortal (in other words, during the alternately infrequent bursts of intense production or the more typical–and boring–hours when it’s work, with all the drudgery that entails). And it’s the down times, often exacerbated by alcohol or drug abuse, that stymied their work, not stimulated it. Just ask Bukowski.

I think it’s a good thing that options are more readily available today. Above and beyond the restorative effects of medication, we are seeing a gradual but hopefully inevitable demystification of some of the more unfortunate stigmas attached to chemical imbalances that cause depression. Simply put, these options were not available for many who came before us. As always, awareness is arguably the first and most important step toward improvement: for the artists, and anyone who cares about what they create.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Anne Sexton, Hemingway, John Kennedy Toole, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima

George Saunders: This Is His Time

January 30, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, the New York Times magazine featured the guy pictured above in a cover story entitled “George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”. Check it out here.

Who is George Saunders, you ask?

Quite possibly the best writer of his generation. He specializes in the form many have attempted and (very) few have done successfully, the short story.

Check out his work here and pick up one of his collections.

My .02: If you like your writing brilliant, amusing, slightly (and sometimes way) off-center and occasionally devastating, he’s your guy.

If you’re looking for a place to start, the brilliantly titled In Persuasion Nation should do the trick. It is an excellent introduction to the Saunders sensibility (you’ll know what I mean once you read a story or two). By the time you’ve got some of his stories under your belt, you’ll realize Saunders is not only an important writer, but he has cultivated a distinct style. Anyone who has ever tried to write understands how exceedingly difficult this is to achieve.

In addition, the aforementioned collection features one of the best short stories I’ve read this past decade, “The Red Bow” (which I originally read in Esquire). You can read it online here.

(Without giving too much away, I’d suggest it’s not only the best piece of fiction written about 9/11, it’s arguably the best piece of writing, period, about 9/11 (the causes, effects, aftermath, etc.) that I’ve come across. So there’s that. And with news that the overdue closing of Guantanamo is looking less likely anytime soon –more on that here, here, and my own thoughts, from over four years ago, here– this story is a reminder of how far we’ve fallen in such a short time. And it also serves to reinforce the spirit of what the great poet William Carlos Williams once wrote: It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die every day for lack of what is found there. When it comes to the art of the short story, in general, and Saunders, in particular, and “The Red Bow” especially, I wonder if the true value of our best short fiction is not that it explains what we need to know so much as why we need to know what we don’t yet know.)

I have acquired, but not yet begun, his latest collection, Tenth of December, but it’s getting praise in all the right places. Google “George Saunders” and see for yourself.

He appeared on “The Colbert Report” last night (see the video, below). An actual literary writer getting some prime time love!

That alone is reason for celebration, but check out the clip: you’ll perceive what a cool, sensitive (and funny) dude he is. This approbation could not come at a better time (for him, for us) and it could not happen to a more deserving person.

That’s all I have to say. Other than this: do yourself a serious favor and get familiar with a writer who is quickly approaching “national treasure” status.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: George Saunders, Stephen Colbert

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: The Play’s The Thing (Revisited)

December 22, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

(So…I guess the world didn’t end yesterday. Seems appropriate, then, to think about where we go before and after we’re here. Or what about if we were never here in the first place? Tom Stoppard did some heavy metaphysical lifting and it’s our pleasure to learn from and enjoy it!)

***

Spoiler alert: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die.

They are, in fact, already dead. And they always have been.

But you knew that already, right?

Another spoiler: You, too, shall die one day.

Here’s the rub: they didn’t know when or why, and neither will you.

But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Extended, circular interlocutions about the fragility of life or the meaning of reality or the existence of meaning itself were certainly more fashionable in the late ’60s, when this play was first presented, but you need not be obsessed by existential angst to enjoy this slippery mind-screw. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is not an instrument used for scratching those metaphysical itches; it is the itch itself. On the page, like so many plays, it is sufficiently delightful, but brought to life (like the best plays) it sparkles. Of course, even the best plays sometimes suffer from casts, however game, that are not worthy of the material they are provided. Fortunately, this one not only made it to the pretty-big screen, it attracted two of the best British thespians of their time: Gary Oldman (who was known mostly for his role in Sid and Nancy) and Tim Roth (not really known at all, at least outside the UK, circa 1990). Perhaps most miraculous, it also features Richard Dreyfuss, who manages not to be insufferable, perhaps for the last time in his career.

Anyone familiar with Hamlet well recalls that there is a play within a play that takes place: “The play’s the thing –wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” So how about a play about a play within a play? That is what Tom Stoppard attempts with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. He pulls it off, but also achieves many other extraordinary things in this meditation on life and art, art vs. life, the meaning of life, the meaning of art, the meaning of words, the meaning of…meaning, free will, faith and fate. In other words, he explores the sorts of Big Themes that are usually capitalized.

One of the best scenes occurs when the two protagonists play a game of Questions. This bit qualifies as catnip for the overly literate; for anyone who actually gets excited about art, this is intellectual porn. (Like the play itself, it works well on the page, but is considerably improved by the audio and visual qualities of real people doing real things in the service of artifice. On aesthetic and literal levels, the young Gary Oldman channels intelligence, physical beauty, mental acuity and the fey insouciance of a player being pulled on a playwright’s strings, which is precisely what he is. Also, all of the questions inherent in the play –and in the two men’s confused existences– are artfully woven into this ingenious little scene.)

A play (and movie) this excellent, if semi-obscure, has been reviewed well (and well-reviewed) enough times that a summary of the plot –such as it is– is not necessary. Certainly, a passing acquaintance with Shakespeare’s greatest work would seem obligatory, although the screen version could arguably be enjoyed on its own terms. For me, Stoppard’s true triumph here is not the surreal masterstroke of making marginal characters the main players, or scrutinizing the role of free will (in art, and in life) or in presenting a narrative where the conclusion is telegraphed from the get-go and still making it suspenseful, although those are all remarkable achievements. And, while it is convincingly rendered, he shouldn’t receive too much credit for reinforcing the obvious, if facile reality that we are all the stars of our own story, regardless of how inconsequential our thoughts and actions are in the proverbial pages of history (“All the world’s a stage”, etc.). The enduring impact of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead might be the manner in which Stoppard takes on the Big Questions that philosophers, poets, priests and everyone else have agonized over for centuries and arrives at an explanation even The Bard would likely endorse: it’s not so much that there aren’t any answers (there aren’t) but that we ask the questions at all. By asking the questions, we see the silliness, we hear the humor, we observe the awful and we eventually come to understand the most important thing, the only thing that matters: we are alive.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: California Guitar Trio, Echoes, Gary Oldman, Richard Dreyfuss, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tim Roth, Tom Stoppard

Sui generis on the rocks: Christopher Hitchens (One Year Later)

December 21, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

The best way to compliment a writer, as a reader, is to recommend their work to others. That I wholeheartedly do –and have done.

The best way to compliment a writer, as a writer, is to recognize, with neither regret nor resignation, that on your best day you will always stand in awe of what they achieved.

Reading and responding to The Hitch is ceaselessly inspiring and seldom less than exhilarating. More, it is an instigatory experience: it compels you to get involved more deeply with the world around and inside you. Reading any worthwhile writer is an act of celebration, a shared reaction to the act of creation. More, it is an exercise in how to write, read, think and live.

The best tribute I can offer to Hitch is that even when he infuriated me (something he did often when he wrote about politics after 9/11), he excited me. I’ve never read a writer who thrilled me as consistently and thoroughly as Hitchens did. He is one of the very few writers who could write about virtually anything and I’d want to read his take. Even, or perhaps especially, when I disagreed with him I came away a more informed and better equipped. In this sense, Hitchens –who at different times could accurately be described as a Marxist, a contrarian, a reactionary and an iconoclast– provided lessons for how to engage intellectually and spiritually (yes, spiritually) with the world. And think about those four words (and there are many others I could use): how many public figures could conceivably, much less convincingly, be described thusly? If Hitchens had sold out, his ostensibly contradictory stances might seem like a case of cognitive dissonance. In actuality, it was the evidence of his ongoing evolution, as a thinker, writer and human being. Evolution is never static, and Hitchens was always moving forward: ravenous, curious, ornery, insatiable. Above all, he burrowed into the world with the glee and intensity of a converted soul. His salvation was not religion; it was the simple and profound act of existing: I think, therefore I am.

Hitchens combined the range of Twain, the erudition of Mencken and the irreverence of Hunter S. Thompson. Of course he also had the political courage of Orwell, the acerbic wit of Cyril Connolly and the adroit literary acumen as his great friend Martin Amis. Of all the writers whose work I’ve worshipped, Hitchens was the most fully-formed summation of his influences; as a result of his monomaniacal addiction to knowledge, he produced an insight that is at once all-encompassing and wholly unique. At his best, Hitchens could remind you of any number of geniuses; at the same time, nobody else is like Hitchens. The Hitch is sui generis, on the rocks.

Here’s the deal: even as I felt intense discomfort for how cozy he became with the architects of our recently-concluded (?) quagmire, it was difficult to write him off. For one thing, he never stood to profit in any sense of the word, and I believe he was inexorably affected by what his mate Salman Rushdie endured (when he was notably one of the few artists willing to stand up and defend Rushdie). Over time he came to –wrongly in my view– perceive a very gray (and shady) situation as black and white. It wasn’t like he ever turned tail and apologized for being a liberal (like some of his ersthwhile allies did); he certainly did not embrace his new “friends” on the Right in any meaningful way. He was cocksure, inscrutable and resolute to the end; if he was a big pig-headed at times, in my estimation he was never opportunistic or craven. How many legit famous people can we say that about?

The best way to compliment a person for the life they lived is how they choose to die.

That seems to cute by half, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. Of course, few of us have the opportunity to choose how, or when, we die. For the unfortunate folks who contend with cancer, the choice is made for us. The true measure of the courage of one’s convictions is how those convictions hold up under duress. Hitchens promised he would never “find” religion once he was diagnosed with what turned out to be the ailment that took him out. True to his word, as usual, as ever, he was unflinching to the end, even as the hideous disease made him emaciated, weak and fried inside-out. (A bit more on how that happens, here.) True to his nature, he not only refused to give quarter, he took every opportunity to reiterate the feelings he had about all-things religious. (A bit more on that, here.)

People who live the right way are living lessons on how to exist, aspire and inevitably, to perish. Hitchens, through his example, will remain a vivid and unquenchable exhibit for how to suck the marrow out of this life, as Thoreau admonished us to do. The mind-boggling body of work he leaves behind will ensure that this world is never without him. Which, in the final analysis is a relief, because the world is already a poorer place without further input from this unbowed, inimitable piece of work.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Amis, Hitchens, Rushdie

Just Say No or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex (In Fiction): Revisited

December 6, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Lying in bed, thinking about geometry.

Like: how my arm next to her ass makes a right angle, or how her legs in either direction form an isosceles triangle (or is it scalene?), scaling the perimeter from her belly button to below is heaven, or how the distance from my rectangle to her Pi is infinity; or: A cup plus B-cup equals See. Proof: if her panties come off, then I will be pleased. Two shapes under the sheets are congruent to each other. She turns 180 degrees. I check my work. Pass/fail, graded on the curves. Obtuse, an open book exam, I ask for extra credit.

***

Writing about sex is like engaging in sex: it’s hard. (Or, it should be.)

It’s that time of year again: the annual “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” conducted by the Literary Review (London). (This year’s winner: Nancy Huston; story and runner-ups here.) Last year I noted that Laura Miller at Salon made much or at least some ado about nuttin’ (sorry) while discussing this dubious honor that gets distributed with snark aforethought. My .02: She takes exception to the glee with which these awards are doled out, the entire affair a combination of prurience and the Puritanical impulse that has ever afflicted our upper classes. Her position asserts that we are a bunch of snobs when it comes to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup proposition of combining sex and literature. I think she is (wisely? cynically?) using the occasion of the Bad Sex award to make a larger point about what we talk about when we talk about sex (in fiction): she’s all for it. She does, however, utilize a bit of a Straw Man to complain about the Literary Review’s annual endeavor, suggesting that more self-aware readers have –or should have– no qualms about moments of lust (and the moments those moments lead to) in literature.

I think the issue is not so much the fact that these scenes exist, but that they are invariably so uninspired or unintentionally ridiculous. Or, readers are most likely not saying not to include sex in novels, but that writers should do everyone a favor and not include scenes that make a mockery of the act so many people hold sacred –at least in theory. After all, the mostly unspoken calculus that occurs under cover of intimacy compels relationships and builds or destroys marriages, even families. Indeed, for more members of our species than we may care to admit, the act (the thought of it, the desire for it, the lack of it) influences almost every waking moment. So, perhaps readers are merely admonishing those who would kiss and tell: proceed warily if you must. Is that too much to ask?

Let’s face it: convincing sex scenes happen seldom enough in real life. How –or why– do we expect them to occur in literature? Especially when most writers (the honest ones would admit) are not exactly Lotharios, unless you count the cliched rite of passage, so often rendered, involving the professorial seduction of the over-achieving undergrad. (And those scenes, even though the authors don’t realize it, are less erotic than confessional, and more than a little embarrassing for all involved).

So how do you do it? Sex scenes, that is.

Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the act, much less the art, of seduction and surrender understands that successful sex is like almost any human endeavor: you don’t need to talk about it if you can do it –whatever it is. Or, the people who speak (and write) the loudest are probably not the people you want beneath you or on top of you, and they certainly are not the ones you should be paying to be your creative tour guide.

Show, don’t tell. That is the sacrosanct rule for any type of written endeavor. And except for the masters (in art; in life) who actually did it and are speaking from experience, the rule should always apply. The exception can –and should– be made for the ones who are able to put it plainly because their prose is essentially a declaration: I did it, this is how I did it, and if you hope to do it you might imitate this depiction. Put another way, I learned more from Milan Kundera and his understated field notes than I did from our more celebrated purveyors of purple-prosed literary porn like Updike and Roth (both of whom have been celebrated and savaged for the arrested sexual development they so gratuitously struggle with in the cringe-inducing excerpts from their oeuvres).

Besides, experts have informed me that this is what the Internet is for. Forget books and even movies. If music and conversation (that old fashioned and unforced chemistry called charm), and a competently cooked meal can’t get you to the Promised Land, you may as well cast a line into the weird, wild web. And, if you are irretrievably old school, seek salvation in one of those books with Fabio on the cover.

***

Take off all your clothes, I say.

No, she laughs.

So: sober, there are no easy excuses. Excuses make it easier, and the easier it is, the easier it is to make excuses. Conversation can kill everything: access, intimacy (which is ironic), and mostly it can provide a good enough excuse. Stuck between a rock and a not-hard-enough place.

“Be careful,” I say as she gets down on the carpet to entertain my dog’s playful overtures. “He’s a lady-killer.”

“Like his daddy?” she asks, making it too easy, or not easy enough, depending on how it all undresses.

“Hardly,” I say, reaching for the bottle of wine that is equal parts incriminating and inspiring. Mostly, and most importantly, it is empty.

“You two make a cute couple,” I say, equal parts innocent, honest, and envious.

“Why don’t you join us?”

Put on all your clothes, I do not say.

“Are you drunk,” she says.

“Never,” I lie.

“Am I drunk?” she asks.

“Not enough,” I sigh.

“What did you say?” she whispers.

“Nothing,” I lie.

Take off all your clothes, she laughs.

Okay, I say.

***

You ask: What happened next?

See for yourself, I say.

If you can, that is.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, John Updike, Julia Roberts, Laura Miller, Literary Review, Milan Kundera, Nancy Huston, Philip Roth, Salon.com, Sam Rockwell