Despite my initial aspirations and productivity, I have found that the familiar books have been the hardest to interpret, the most likely to hamstring me over a period of weeks or months. Always they require rereading, and sometimes something more drastic.  I’ve been stalled on Tender is the Night since October, which befuddled me to the extent that, not only did I have to reread it a third time, I had to reread all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and meditate on them before deciding that I know less, possibly, than I did before.

I used to feel that the novel output of Fitzgerald was like the literary version of the Myers Briggs test: whichever one a person favored was some fundamental indicator of his or her personality.  Roughly it followed that ordinary and banal people liked The Great Gatsby, snotty, effete types liked This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned was for the discerning and unconventional (I’ll let you guess in which camp I numbered myself).  Tender is the Night was sort of an unknown quantity, preferred by dramatic people, maybe, or people who take pills.  This fall, in a classic Modern Library Revue time-suck, I revisited my youthful prejudices, all in service of understanding Fitzgerald’s last, strangest novel.

I can’t say that revisiting my youthful prejudices has confirmed them — This Side of Paradise crept up in my estimation, while The Beautiful and Damned moved slightly down, even while retaining the coveted corner office of my heart.  However, to venture onto a tangent, I can say that The Great Gatsby still remains for me the least stirring of Fitzgerald’s novels.  Perhaps it’s due to some  wellspring of hipster haterade that must deem things played out, or perhaps The Great Gatsby is so great that it has actually managed to play itself out.  After all, it’s as familiar now as the noble bombast penned by Fitzgerald’s own relative, the green light like the rocket’s red flare, the pier at East Egg like the ever-stalwart rampart, the boats beating on like liberty itself.

I feel that The Great Gatsby is the most together, the most surgically artistic effort of a novelist who was more exciting when he was not trying to contain the hot, maudlin, meandering mess of his own talent. (For the record, I also sense something phony about Gatsby’s very phoniness — for me the only convincing poor person Fitzgerald wrote was one who lost his fortune, not one who made it.  Fitzgerald’s poor people were like his black people or his Jews–all characteristics, no character.)

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If The Great Gatsby represents the nadir of said hot mess, Tender is the Night is its sprawling apotheosis.  It’s hard to know what to say about this sultry dream of a book. Aesthetically it is very beautiful, the most impressionistic of Fitzgerald’s novels.  A paragraph about Gausse’s Riviera beach makes me want to disport myself in the wine-dark sea, and ruin my skin in the sun wearing pearls and a marcel wave.  There is a striking amount of color: the first two pages features a “tan prayer rug of a beach,” the “pink and cream of old fortifications,” a “purple Alp,” a man in a blue bathrobe, a girl with pink palms.  The first half of the novel is all a bright haze of color, sensation, perception, personality.  The revelation that the life events of the novel’s motley crew of upper-crusters might have anything to do with something like a plot is a surprise when it comes, about a third of the way through the novel.

As a plot, it’s an odd one, full of a kind of fruitless drama and portents that somehow portend both nothing and everything.  Only the flimsiest motives are provided to explain why a man like the superhero Dick Diver, with his jaunty striped shorts and bathing cap, should piss away his life, trade in his professional credibility and crazed beautiful wife and Riviera idylls for a ruined liver and thwarted attempts at grab-ass in sleepy villages along the Hudson.  Even fewer reasons are provided for why we should care.  The demise part is okay — that’s a theme in all the novels past This Side of Paradise.  But Dick and Nicole Diver are the sort of unlikable corollaries of Anthony and Gloria Patch of The Beautiful and Damned, which is a great, old-fashioned morality tale with implacable logic.  I think it’s a shame, how it works out for the Divers, but they never seemed like very fine people to me.

I found an explanation for the novel’s strangeness partly in a 1962 New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins about Sara and Gerald Murphy, the original inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver.  The novel started out to be about the Murphys, and turned, says Tomkins, into a book about the Fitzgeralds (who were also the models for Anthony and Gloria Patch).  These Murphys were real Somebodys, who knew everybody and lived artfully in Paris and on the Riviera, which they actually discovered as a summer destination.

Tomkins’s profile, which is well worth reading, has its own, dare I say, novelistic logic.  I spent the first half of the piece feeling a certain savagery toward the Murphys.  Page one (of thirteen) makes Tender is the Night out to be a turd on the porcelain of the Murphys’ impeccable lives:

“I didn’t like the book when I read it, and I liked it even less on rereading,” Sara said. “I reject categorically any resemblance to us or to anyone we knew at any time.” Gerald, on the other hand, was fascinated to discover…how Fitzgerald had used “everything he noted or was told about by me” during the years that the two couples spent together…Almost every incident, he became aware, almost every conversation in the opening section of the book had some basis in an actual event or conversation involving the Murphys, although it was often altered or distorted in detail.

I found both positions deeply suspect — the vehement denials and the faux naivete about artists, from people who surrounded themselves with artists (Hemingway, Stravinsky, MacLeish, Dos Passos, etc.).  This strain of philistinism was as alienating to me as the impeccable lives:

Those closest to the Murphys find it almost impossible to describe the special quality of their life, or the charm it had for their friends. An evening spent in their fragrant garden, looking out over the water toward Cannes and the mountains beyond, listening to records from Gerald’s encyclopedic collection (everything from Bach to the latest jazz), savoring the delicious food that always seemed to appear, exquisitely prepared and served, at the precise moment and under the precise circumstances guaranteed to bring out all its best qualities (Provençal dishes, for the most part, with vegetables and fruits from the Murphys’ garden, though there was often a typically American dish, such as poached eggs on a bed of creamed corn); the passionate attention to every detail of his guests’ pleasure that gave Murphy himself such obvious pleasure; Sara’s piquant beauty and wit, and the intense joy she took in her life and her friends; the three beautiful children, who seemed, like most children who inhabit a special private world, to be completely at home in adult company (Honoria, who looked like a Renoir and was dressed accordingly; Baoth, robust and athletic; Patrick, disturbingly delicate, and with a mercurial brilliance that made him seem “more Gerald than Gerald”) — all contributed to an atmosphere that most people felt wonderfully privileged to share…

And then came their singing of the “American Negro spirituals.”

(All this, even the title of the profile–”Living Well is the Best Revenge”–made me want to throw their smug lives in their faces.  Revenge against what?  Against the horrible smashup of the Fitzgeralds — one drunk, one crazy — one who died choking on blood, the other on smoke, both before they reached 50?)

Tomkins’s society-page raptures notwithstanding, somewhere around the middle of the thing I began to defrost.  First, there’s the death of two of the Murphys’ children — pain that cannot be extinguished by any amount of exquisite living.  Then, in the excerpts of letters to and from the Murphys and Fitzgeralds, the real depth of their friendship (relationship, better to say), was revealed.  I cannot imagine a relationship of my own bearing so much volatility — surrendering my home to an unhinged friend, placating my other guests when friend flings figs and ashtrays, putting up with his barbs and his staring and his weird questions about money, finally reading myself in his unedifying novel as the beautiful mental patient, the incest victim, the involved but unloving mother.  It would be a lot.

Tomkins’s descriptions of the Murphys’ collective life are very like the tableaux Fitzgerald creates in Tender is the Night.  Here, in the novel, the young film actress Rosemary is entranced by the Divers on the Mediterranean shores:

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.  Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.  The Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did not know that there would be another transition presently from the utter absorption of the swim to the garrulity of the Provencal lunch hour.

What is missing from Tomkins’s account is the resentment that runs through Tender is the Night, the resentment I instinctively felt myself for the Murphys’ Mediterranean menage.  Seen thus, the novel is almost a revenge against the Murphys’ good lives, a preemptive retribution; right around the time that Fitzgerald started to die in Hollywood, Gerald Murphy–whose own melancholy spells Tomkins mentions only in passing–took up the family business, a little outfit called Mark Cross, and did a thriving trade for two decades.  Perhaps the novel even adds some necessary balance to Tomkins’s fulsomeness.

But as the character of Dick Diver transmutes to Fitzgerald himself, the resentment takes on a strange key.  In a novel partly about psychoanalysis, what does it mean that Abe North, the drunk creative type clearly modelled on Fitzgerald, is kicked to death on a spree in New York, a moment that roughly marks the start of Dick Diver’s slow, similarly gin-soaked decline? (Nicole Diver was raped by her father in her lonely adolescence, an event that led to her nervous breakdown.  And yet somehow Dick Diver’s Gendarmo punchout, when his Fitzgeraldian side is ascendant, is five-fold more awful.) The novel even suggests, with Fitzgerald’s characteristic attention to money, that Dick’s demise is a tied to his unmanning financial dependence on Nicole. More resentment, class bitterness transferred.

Tender is the Night is no Gatsby, with everything nailed down tight as a coffin-lid at the end.  When the novel is over, Dick is still shunting around doing God knows what and living off of Nicole, who has been transferred part and parcel to another, less cerebral man.  There’s nary a moral to be had between this novel and its characters.  Yet curiously, even with its multiple lives clumsily conflated — extraordinary lives, furthermore, with outsize amounts of talent, privilege, and misfortune — there is something true and lifelike about this flawed, lovely, befuddling book.  Writing well may not be the best revenge, but a few decades later, it comes pretty close.

Talking about traveling, particularly the rugged variety of traveling favored by the youth, can so quickly become an exercise in witting and unwitting and halfwitting braggartry about the distance from indoor plumbing, the extreme isolation of one’s guesthouse, and the rustic nobility of one’s hosts, that it usually seems better to avoid the subject altogether. And now that I look back at my charmed early 20s and realize the immensity of the gift bestowed upon me — the gift of going places and seeing things — to even speak of those days seems gauche. Better I should husband my accounts as ready capital for some social moment when my footing is unsure. If I meet you and mention Uzbekistan, what am I wearing? Is it a turtleneck? Is there an odor?

Re-reading Midnight’s Children this summer was such a transporting experience, however, that I am compelled to mention those days on the road, when Saleem Sinai revealed a world beyond the dingy windows of unremitting buses and trains. Dunya dekho, “see the world,” as the dugdugee man Lifafa Das cries, with his postcard peepshow of Indian wonders.

I traveled with two friends, and we dutifully cultivated our up-for-anythingness. In Mumbai, picked up off the street in a routine roundup of foreign faces, we had our hair combed and — with Hungarians, with Kenyans, with Finns — played the Nascar fans of Bollywood’s imagining. We trudged across Chowpatty beach and up the Malabar hill and looked solemnly in the direction of the Tower of Silence, entrance barred the non-Parsi. There in the valley of the shadow of death, we spent our filmi proceeds on Pizza Hut and felt bad about ourselves. We saw Don in the cool movie theater. We sweated and itched through the night in gender-segregated wings of the Salvation Army.

Our strategy was speed and distance, and we were up for anything in New Delhi and Pushkar; Agra and Varanasi; Kerala and Munnar and Madurai. By Bangalore, we were no longer up for very much — that’s when we saw The Departed. In Chennai, we were like limp rags. Throughout our peregrinations, the feeling was not all we had seen, but all we hadn’t. The map was big enough for years of days of train rides and new towns, different holidays and seasons. When you go somewhere new, without the funds to elevate you to the echelon of luxury that is its own country, inevitably there comes a moment when you look around and realize that you have no idea what the fuck is going on. In these moments my Indian book club of one succored me, gave context to the long days of new sights and sounds.

My companions protested when I disappeared into my book at train platforms, abandoning them to the stultifying boredom and endless mini-backgammon of extended travel. I suppose it was bunkum, methodologically speaking, but Midnight’s Children was Lonely Planet and spiritual Baedeker. Pondicherry was all bicycles and sea breeze, but from the pages of Rushdie’s novel I gazed back-to-Bom and imagined what it might have felt like to understand the secret dimensions of those afternoons, “hot as towels,” when we felt tired and bewildered and alone.

We had come to India, in a route that makes us sound much more cosmopolitan then we are, via Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Central Asia I had been astonished and soothed by the discovery of an immense and flexible web of cognate Turkic languages. With middling Turkish, it seemed a miracle to be able to pay a taxi driver, to find Exits and Entrances, to identify the Interrogative Mood, if not the nature of the interrogation. Reading Midnight’s Children, another web asserted itself. From Salman Rushdie I learned about what I now think of as the Janum trail, a Persianate path circling a third of the earth, demarcated by the term of endearment meaning “my life, my soul,” which made its way into every language the Iranic tongue touched. Midnight’s Children was peppered with other words I knew, carried across around the continent in their original Persian or Arabic: words like dunya (world) and hamal (porter), the booze-prescribing Doctor Sharabi (from wine).

Just a few little words, but they packed a wallop.  Reading this novel I realized for the first time that language is a map of history, and wondered how it had been drawn.  And better than any guide book, Midnight’s Children suggested the extreme variety, the multitudinous tongues and what the anthropologists call “lifeways” of India.  Saleem Sinai,  he of the classy Lucknow Urdu and the topographical face, who wanders into the language riots, whose mind is a cacophony of children’s polyglot voices–if language is a map, he is the compass rose.

More methodological bunkum, but I’m on the record as getting 70 percent of my history learning from novels. And talk of history! Some greater percentage of Rushdie’s allegories remain obscure to me, but some things are clear: India was chaos, Saleem tells us, and yet its artificial rivening was a profound human tragedy. Across a new line on the map, Saleem’s interior radio can no longer broadcast the voices of his compatriots. In an abandoned battlefield in contested territory, he runs across a talking pyramid, the mutilated remains of his old playmates from the Methwold estate. The tragedies pile up; the people in charge make criminal, monstrous errors.

There’s history on history. The great polymath Sir William “Oriental” Jones went to India and to him was revealed the Indo-European language family, a discovery which would later pave the way for the racialist theories of the blood, the traits and so-called purity thereof. What’s in Saleem Sinai’s blood, besides snake venom and chutney? He’s the the natural child of a be-toupeed Englishman (ba-toupee and be-toupee, if I may venture a modest Urdu pun) and a cuckolding Indian wife; unnatural grandson of German-educated Kashmiri-turned-Indian; faux Mughal (which is really a kind of Turk); soldier in the Land of the Pure. In the words Mary Pereira, a Bombay Goan (“those Anglos,” tuts Saleem’s mother): “Anything you want to be you can be: You can be just what-all you want.” Until Indira Gandhi steals your balls, that is.

Saleem Sinai looks back on his narrative finds his dates don’t add up. I looked through my emails — with ticket stubs and postcards, my only record of the period — and there is one mention of this novel, an unfavorable comparison to The Tin Drum. How can this be? How could I have been so ungrateful after all Midnight’s Children did for me? What else have I gotten wrong in my own recollections, inconsequential as they may be? (Did I even know the word hamal back then?  It seems unlikely.)

No matter; I see it all clearly now. Another thing I learned from this transforming novel: To write the past, you “have to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet.”

The Divine Comedy has a lot of politics in it, Guelphs and Ghibellines and so forth, because Dante was a political animal who went through the wringer and finally lived out his days in exile, a self-described “party of one.” After centuries, most of us read the poet’s verse and the footnotes prepared by dedicated historians and have only the vaguest sense of who everyone was. Still, we know that they are meaningful in their perdition or their grace.

Robert Penn Warren’s tortured narrator, Jack Burden, was a party of one if ever one there was: a failed law student, historian, journalist, henchman, ungentlemanly Southern gent. Like Dante, he is prone to sudden sleep and wandering into error. Warren evidently protested the designation, but I’ll allow that All the King’s Men is a novel about politics in the Dantean sense — politics happens in the story, Guelphs and Ghibellines and hicks and state power and porcine Duffy and inscrutable Stark. But it’s not Willie Stark who makes the lasting impression in this novel. It’s Jack Burden, party of one, who midway through the journey of his life finds himself in a dark wood, the right path lost. He is here to tell us about several generations of honor and shame, about soiling your good name and living, or not living, with the results. There is no one in this novel, save perhaps the long-suffering Lucy, who does not stain him or herself with some kind of wrong.

Dante was a party of one, but he was also a patriot, if we can try and understand the word outside of that dubious 19th-century invention, the nation state. Dante was a Florentine who loved his city; he celebrated and indicted it in his lovely poem in his beloved language. Reading All the King’s Men, I thought a lot about patriotism. This novel is written so beautifully, so stylishly, and feels so American — with all the muddled greatness and shittiness that descriptor implies — that my decrepit patriotism pricked up its ears like it sometimes does when I read a stunning novel about America, in fine American English.

After two foreign wars and all manner of troubling happenings on the domestic front, the thinking American, even while she tells herself that states are a construct, can find herself looking wistfully for uncontentious and productive symbols of homeland pride. In these moments, I settle on rock ‘n’ roll, because I believe that is a genuinely good American invention, one that people from other countries (with the exception of the squares and grumps who turn up in any society) have taken up with great gusto and badass results.

But then, if we work past the hugely powerful instinct to take national ownership in a thing, pride must be tempered by the fact that this American cultural good arose from an indelible stain upon our history. Put very simply, there would be no rock ‘n’ roll, no jazz, if there were no slaves in America. So you recalibrate your patriotic enthusiasm — rock music is a great good with a great evil woven into its roots.

All the King’s Men is a novel that puts shame front and center — personal shame, familial shame, state shame. And see in this novel, that other, larger shame: it’s a novel with “nigger” on the first page, its world reels from the sin of a woman sold down the river. Maybe it’s because the hot, schismatic South has ever had some kind of weird claim on Americanness, but there is something about All the King’s Men that like rock ‘n’ roll seems profoundly American, something paradoxical that makes a person feel like holding up her head about the accident of her citizenship to say, “We made this, so we can’t be all bad,” even while the thing in question in fact confirms that we can be and are that bad — on the national scale, on the universal scale, we’re that bad.

We’re that bad — but some of us can really write.

Can Robert Penn Warren ever write. He’s a poet, and his prose is full of poetry and swagger. It’s not a style I thought I favored; I think of my literary tastes, ironically, as running prim and anglophilic. But perhaps it’s not a style I favor only because it is often imitated, unwittingly or the reverse, with such excruciating results. There are rioting metaphors on every page; cliches lurk around every corner. A hometown hero, a depressive journalist, a yellowing diary, a buried secret, a war, a zaftig bivalvular ex-wife, all written so beautifully I can hardly stand it. My copy is dog-eared the whole way through, the better to find the remarkable passages that proliferate therein.

We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summers before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been falling a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn’t like any of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down through the black, gummy, dispirited air.

They flow like this, one after another, in a manner that sometimes sounds free-wheeling and unconstructed, like a drugstore poet shooting the breeze between sips from his soda pop. But try to write a letter and sound like Robert Penn Warren. Try to write a story.

I rejoice in this great American novel, a reminder of people’s capacity for those universal states, perdition and grace. Jack Burden says “what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost.” Jack Burden asks if we are only as a good as the worst thing we’ve ever done and we have to concede it is so. It is so, but there’s a chance of heaven yet. Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.

The past is a foreign country, and Sister Carrie is our travelogue, with all that document’s power to illuminate and obfuscate. We get a map of the country’s major cities — Chicago and New York — a glimpse at its public transit systems, a review of its restaurants with a sampling of their menus, a glimpse inside its bars and lodgings from the swanky to the squalid. We see the sights and customs: the Elks theatrical, the Broadway promenade, the line of homeless men waiting for twelve-cent beds. The natives eat steak fried in butter obtained on credit from the Gansevoort Market (where the prices are better). We even accustom ourselves to the currency, so that when young Carrie — a small-town girl who makes it big in New York City — signs a theater contract for 150 dollars a week, we remember her four-fifty per week at the Chicago shoe factory, her 28-dollar-a month apartment on Thirteenth Street, and know her velocity.

For one Chicago-residing female reading of another a hundred years prior, there is much to beguile. There is also much to bewilder. In a state of temporal foreignness, it is not always easy to read the signs of the previous century.

I am not so inured to the libertinism of the day that I can’t see it wasn’t quite the thing for young Carrie to wantonly do it with a feller she met on the train — the first of two fellers with whom she so cavalierly trades her feminine goods for a square meal, a place to stay, and some new clothes. It’s not really the thing now, actually. And I can see how Hurstwood, the second of her squires — the one who steals the money from his employers’ cashbox and carries her off to New York under false pretenses — is a Bad Sort. Between this light woman and foolish man, between the shirt-waists and the occasional lumpy old-fashioned quality of Dreiser’s prose, between all this and my misapprehension that to be old is to be God-fearing, I was prepared for the inevitable smiting.

But rather than this profane couple being crushed by the clock tower falling off a church or some such, it is only Hurstwood who comes to a bad end after an excruciating slide to perdition: a self-administered smiting. With an obvious symmetry that is nonetheless quite elegantly carried off, Carrie winds up a successful actress at a fabulous address.

Being a youngish lady myself, and feeling both the lure of nice things and the anxieties of achieving financial security in an uncertain world (the headline of Hurstwood’s newspaper reported 80,000 unemployed New Yorkers), it doesn’t seem so very dire to me when famous Carrie sits in a rocking-chair in her sumptuous apartment and dreams “of such happiness as [she] may never feel.” Maybe I should think of her as an early Marilyn Monroe, destined for despair, but as the novel closes I feel like Carrie did pretty well. Even Dreiser paints her finally as a seeker of the Good and the Beautiful: “Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring.” It’s not much of a smiting, at any rate.

Since we cannot be dual citizens of the past and present, I have no idea if my relatively sanguine view of Carrie’s circumstances at the end of the novel is the result of my morally bankrupt 21st-century status, or because Dreiser was a master of writing the perfect ordinariness of sinful behavior. I think both; Dreiser tells the story in such a way that you can’t hear a mattress creak or smell a hint of brimstone, and I’m a modern miss who finds it normal and unprovoking that things should be so.

Evidently the critics of the early twentieth century, disciples all of what Dreiser called the “genteel tradition,” were provoked. It is instructive to read Dreiser’s foreword to the 1927 Modern Library edition, which describes how the novel was published only at the urging of Frank Norris, another great American writer and shit-disturber, who worked as a reader at Doubleday. According to Dreiser’s foreword, the ink was barely dry on the contract before Mrs. Doubleday herself, a “a social worker and active in moral reform,” insisted that the book be withdrawn. However, Dreiser may have been doing his own myth-making with an apocryphal do-gooding harpy; an article by Jack Salzman for the Journal of American Studies somewhat vindicates Mrs. Doubleday. We know at least that Doubleday in fact sold several hundred copies of the book and that Dreiser was paid accordingly.

Regardless of the veracity of the avenging missus, it’s easily ascertained that American critics found the novel distinctly unedifying. One New York Times reviewer tutted that it was ”a frankly realistic story…a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally…It is a book one can very well get along without reading.”

(The past is a foreign country. Last month I read Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm, a novel in which myriad youngsters are graphically raped to death in baroque prose, and of which it is said in The New Yorker in a truly masterful bit of economy and understatement: “Cooper’s interest in exploring the darkest corners of the human experience — here including incest, rape, and cannibalism — has not dimmed with age.”)

Sinclair Lewis said of his friend Dreiser in his own Nobel lecture, “in [his] world, men and women are often sinful and tragic and despairing, instead of being forever sunny and full of song and virtue, as befits authentic Americans.” This was a problem. From what I gather, a novel of Dreiser’s day should either be moral (presumably with smitings), or it should be peppy, and Sister Carrie is neither of these things. Even so, the critical position was not without pushback — there are two letters subsequent to the Times review of June 1907, from readers who scolded the reviewer for missing the point. There are probably many points that I likewise miss about this novel, and it was comforting to read Donald Pizer’s essay on the long, twisted road of Sister Carrie’s critical reception, wherein we learn that the scholars took decades to agree about what this novel even is.

I wonder what it would feel like to read Sister Carrie as a citizen of the country it describes. We foreigners are lucky to have this novel as window onto the exotic past. I really like Sister Carrie, for its well-drawn sets, its vibrant cities, its views of the territory. I like the charming accent of its old-fashioned prose.

If anything shocks me about this novel now, it is not that Dreiser put two men inside of Carrie’s pants, but that he put himself inside her slow-moving brain. The idea that a novelist cheerfully set out to map the interior of the lower classes and perceived lesser intellects — that is what is shocking today, when social realism is largely restricted to the the author’s own immediate territory, and many novels seem like an elaboration of what authors might share with their therapists.

Today, I contemplate the sheer balls of writing:

Sister Carrie…was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class…A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy…

With these same balls, Dreiser clearly writes himself into the story as the young, superior Ames:

She felt as if she would like to be agreeable to this young man, and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was — that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser.

I don’t think we write books like this anymore. There is something frank, transgressive, awful, and attractive about this liberated language. For what it’s worth, that’s the really scandalous thing about this book, the custom that simply doesn’t do in our own country.

Brief books are dangerous for me, because I am a swift reader and not always a careful one. Big books, when they are not too patently formal experiments, seem better suited to my taste and temperament.  I have something of the philistine in me and short important novels, for no really good reason, threaten artsiness and unfulfillment.   They seem as though they are harder to write, and I worry their authors have more to prove.  How will you make your novel memorable when it it looks so diminutive, sitting there on the shelf?  They require an economy that is against my nature.

I had been meandering through A Suitable Boy, which is familiar and soothes my soul, and I had to forcibly change gears to appreciate Muriel Spark.  This novel is not something huge and engrossing to help you forget the common round of day.  It is over quickly, and you have to pay attention all the way through.  It is a dark and lovely poem, written by the possessor of a sinister wit.  It is a deep pool in an enchanted forest.

Muriel Spark wrote a very nice piece for The New Yorker in which she described her years at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls in Edinburgh, the inspiration for the Marcia Blaine School of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  What I like about the piece, and what I find remarkable in contrast with this sort of creepy novel, is the lightheartedness, warmth, and happiness with which Spark remembers this bygone epoch of young ladies’ education. This is an education which seems in small ways rather gruesome to me.  Most of the young men are gone, for example, because they died in the Great War, and if they didn’t die they were maimed.  The science teacher tells the girls “Poor little Tommy Jones/ We’ll see him no more,/ For what he thought was H₂O/ Was H₂SO₄.”  And there’s Mr. Gordon, the history teacher, in connection with whom Spark writes, ”The innocence of our minds and the universal decency of our schoolteachers’ comportment can be gathered from the fact that he used to make me sit at the front of the class so that he could stroke my hair while teaching, without anyone thinking at all ill of him.”

And yet this time, which seems prime with the makings of a dark novel, inspired Spark’s childhood friend to write, “we had the best life.”  Spark concurs: “In spite of the fact that we had no television, that in my home at least we had no electricity all during the thirties (only beautiful gaslight), that there were no antibiotics and no Pill, I incline to think that [she] is right.”

Then Ms. Kay, the inspiration for Jean Brodie herself:  ”In a sense, Ms. Kay was nothing like Ms. Brodie. In another sense, she was far above and beyond her Brodie counterpart.”  Ms. Kay was immediately recognizable to all her former students in Spark’s novel, and remembered fondly by the same. Spark records Ms. Kay’s position on rain gear:

Why make a wet day more dreary than it is? We should wear bright coats, and carry blue umbrellas, or green…I would like to see a gray coat and skirt for the spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. ‘Citron’ means ‘lemon’; it is a yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue. One would wear a citron beret in Paris with a gray suit.

How heavenly to come under the tutelage of Ms. Kay! Reading the happiness with which Spark described her childhood, I vacillated between thinking I had perhaps read too much grotesquery into the novel, and admiring the artistry which turns a picturesque figure of memory and the interwar spunkiness of the youth into the dubious heroines of an unsettling book.  Because I was unsettled by this book.  What I read into it is the particular weirdness and villainy of women; both the author and her subjects have that hint of the stuff for which they used to burn ladies at the stake.  The recurring sentences become incantations, some of them biblical, like an inverted cross.  And how else to take the death of stupid Mary Macgregor who, we are reminded with cruel repetition, “ran hither and thither till she died”?

Poor Mary!  Miss Brodie tells the girls that silence is golden and calls on Mary to repeat:

Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, ‘Golden.’

‘What did I say was golden?’

Mary cast her eyes around her and up above. Sandy whispered, ‘The falling leaves.’

‘The falling leaves,’ said Mary.

‘Plainly,’ said Miss Brodie, ‘you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me I would make of you the crème de la crème.’

The novel is cruel, and often comic in its cruelty. A man exposes himself to Jenny, one of the Brodie set, as she walks by the Water of Leith. After the initial shock and the subsequent parental hindrance of Jenny’s movements, the event “brought nothing but good. The subject fell under two headings: first, the man himself and the nature of what he had exposed to view, and secondly the policewoman” for whom the girls form an intense passion (the Brodie set in their sex talk sound very like the Mitford sisters in theirs).

Spark, who wrote in her memoir of school that she was ”destined to poetry by all my mentors,” in her novel uses the tools of poetry to change the sense and meaning of prose in an unnerving way:

That spring she monopolised with her class the benches under the elm from which could be seen an endless avenue of dark pink May trees, and heard the trotting of horses in time to the turning wheels of light carts returning home empty by a hidden lane from their early morning rounds.

There is a rhythm to her writing, even apart from the periodic repetitions.

Sandy, the saboteur of the Brodie set, the betrayer of Brodie, converts to Catholicism, joins a convent and attracts a following by writing a treatise on “the nature of moral perception” called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” Spark, with her incantations and her twisty prose and her new words like “unbrainfully,” in her own way transfigures the commonplace on both the spiritual and literal planes: the sunset is “streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.”  The girls of the Brodie set compete with each other on the “windswept hockey fields which lay like the graves of the martyrs exposed to the weather in an outer suburb.” And then one pretender to the Brodie set is actually martyred–the nonentical Joyce Emily, urged by Miss Brodie the fascist to venture off in aid of unspeakable Franco.

The novel is not wholly sinister; it has something of the piquant flavor of Spark’s happy school days.  I think it is a fine place novel too, with Edinburgh (which, as Sandy finds when she enters the convent, is actually a multiplicity of Edinburghs) making itself felt as the backdrop to the book’s action.  The hills that surround them are the Pentland hills, the writers in the girls’ cosmos are Stevenson, Burns, Walter Scott.  There is Scottish pride here.

This novel is like Sandy’s eyes–famous for being small, but photographic, and containing manifold secrets.  It is a weird little book.  I didn’t quite like it first, but now I reckon it among the crème de la crème.

My philosophy, not at all novel, goes well with a glass of coke and A Passage to India. In his belief manifesto, Forster went on to say that “the people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing-holes for the human spirit.” A Passage to India is a work of art by someone who understood that every facet of human life is riddled with contradiction and un-sortable muddle, and that we must carry on regardless. And, like any novel, A Passage to India has its own life outside the hands of its creator. It is in itself a demonstration of the principle that things are that way, and also this. A Passage to India is demonstrative of our very finest human instincts; it is also a problematic novel.

In a novel whose plot hinges upon the existence of an unbridgeable chasm between a set of Us and Them, what I love the most is Forster’s savagery against his own team. In dispatches from inside the club, Forster lays bare the grotesque attitudes of the ruling class. Nothing is more vitriolic in its way than a fed-up colonial, and while few can approach the simmering hate of George Orwell in Burmese Days, Forster’s disdain for his compatriots, showcased in his astonishing prose, goes quite as far as Orwell’s did toward exposing the profound poverty of the white man’s burden. When Adela has made her accusation of Aziz, the English hunker down in the club:

One young mother — a brainless but most beautiful girl — sat on a low ottoman in the smoking-room with her baby in her arms; her husband was away in the district, and she dared not return to her bungalow in case the “niggers attacked.” The wife of a small railway official, she was generally snubbed; but this evening, with her abundant figure and masses of corn-gold hair, she symbolized all that is worth fighting and dying for; more permanent a symbol, perhaps, than poor Adela.

Page after page, Forster reveals the hypocrisy and general nastiness of the noble rulers, from the young and not wholly repellent transplant Heaslop, to the ossified Old Hand in the form of the Collector (“I have had twenty-five years’ experience of this country”–he paused, and ‘twenty-five years’ seemed to fill the waiting-room with their staleness and ungenerosity…”)

Here and elsewhere, Forster had it out for the Old Hand. Like most men of the world, he was protective of his traversed domains. He distinguished between real knowledge and false, those who know and those who do not, and those who know too much of the wrong thing. In his essay “Salute to the Orient,” he exhorts, “O deliver my soul from efficiency! When obstacles cease to occur in my plans, when I always get the utmost out of Orientals, it will be the surest proof that I have lost the East.” He tells us about the kind of traveler least likely to “salute the Orient” properly–a fusty old-timer with letters of introduction, who returns from his journey full of riveting anecdotes: “After an interesting conversation with the Mufti, in which Henry acted as interpreter, Lucy and I proceeded to inspect the so-called tomb of Potiphar’s wife.”

Forster is the enemy of the Old Hand, of his boring stories, his certainty, his smallness, his silly theories. Of the novel’s McBryde, District Superintendent of Police and the “most reflective and best educated of the Chandrapore officials,” Forster reveals that

…No Indian ever surprised him, because he had a theory about climatic zones. The theory ran: “All unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30. They are not to blame, they have not a dog’s chance–we should be like them if we settled here.” Born at Karachi, he seemed to contradict this theory, and would sometimes admit as much with a sad, quiet smile.

The thing is, to be so seasoned a connoisseur of the Old Hand, one must likewise approach a state of Old-Handedness. This gets to the heart of both my admiration and my anxieties about this novel. How can we write across culture, or think across culture, even, in a way that is fair? The cowardly answer is that we can’t. We can’t think about anyone who is not ourselves in a way that is fair. We can’t think of ourselves in a way that is fair. Fortunately, Forster was not cowardly. It would have been a shame had he been prevented from writing this extraordinary novel because he took a college course about the dangers of Othering. We miss out if we are frightened to write about the world, especially if, like Forster, much of what we write is at odds with the edifice of policy or public opinion.

Still, there is a way that speaking of difference can inject a subtle poison into the air, especially when the playing field is unequal. Forster, the man who once wrote “Only connect!” knew this–it is in a way the premise of his novel. He was, after all, President of the Cambridge Humanists. Nonetheless, we should be mindful of the times–the early twenties–and of Forster’s own status as an Old Hand; we should be conscious of the way that observations, even from subtle and sympathetic minds, acquire their own patina of ungenerosity. ”Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.” Later, “Are Indians cowards? No but they are bad starters and occasionally jib.”

In our current age, during which immeasurable ink has been spilled on the purportedly forever-and-ever “Clash of Civilizations,” with the East represented by the clamoring Muslim hordes and the West represented, presumably, by George Bush, purveyor of light, it is refreshing in a grim sort of way to read about the good old days, when Islam still enjoyed the (comparatively) vaunted position granted it in western Europe by the nineteenth century British orientalists. In Forster’s novel, Islam is the exotic yet comprehensible religion of Fielding’s friends. In A Passage to India, religious strife is a purely domestic problem. Moreover, it is the comically inscrutable Hindus who are treated most irreverently by the novelist. (Of the exasperating Professor Godbole it is written that his conversations “frequently culminated in a cow.”)

It’s curious to see the relative ease at which “clash” models are transmuted to fit their times, how quickly they become self-fulfilling prophesy. In Forster’s East v. West match, the result of which is that the well-meaning Aziz and Fielding cannot maintain a friendship, it is not humdrum religious rancor that creates a rift. In this novel, it is the old-fashioned kind of Orientalism–at once promulgated and illuminated by Forster’s sympathy–that explains the troubles in this India. In this novel, the disease is the British Raj, it is the jib Indians, it is the poison of ill will and the strain of good will, it is the earth itself that keeps the two men apart:

The horses didn’t want it–they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “no, not there.”

I like the anecdote about Gandhi on Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” I’m sure that a brief sit-down with Christopher Hitchens or even an ideological and self-possessed tween would show me to myself as a waffling liberal twit, but I like to think there is no East and West. Forster would disagree. I think we would both be right.

I feel a bit like the irrepressible Dr. Godbole who, when asked for his opinion about the charges against Aziz, responds thus:

“I am informed that an evil action was performed in the Marabar Hills, and that a highly esteemed English lady is now seriously ill in consequence. My answer to that is this: that action was performed by Dr. Aziz.” He stopped and sucked in his thin cheeks. “It was performed by the guide.” He stopped again. “It was performed by you.” Now he had an air of daring and of coyness. “It was performed by me.”  He looked shyly down the sleeve of his own coat.  “And by my students. It was even performed by the lady herself.  When evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe.  Similarly when good occurs.”

“And similarly when suffering occurs, and so on and so forth, and everything is anything and nothing something,” [Fielding] muttered in his irritation, for he needed the solid ground.

Fielding’s aggravation notwithstanding, I think Forster built up much of his novel around Godbole’s philosophy. Things are that way, and also this; we must carry on regardless.

This novel gives me some trouble–considerable food for thought, better to say–but I love it. I love it for its perfect writing and I love it for its courage and its sympathy. In his later essay on belief, Forster describes his own vision of what he calls the “aristocracy” of humanity: “They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.”

If this novel isn’t the work of just such an aristocrat, I don’t know what is.

I don’t have much to say about my “process,” such as it is, but I’ll tell you that I was feeling parched, critically speaking.  I just reread 1984 with an eye toward revueing.  George Orwell compels people to muster profundities about the current state of affairs.  He plucked all of the smart ideas about politics out of the ether and arranged them on paper for us to wantonly reinterpret to fit the times.  But what can I think or say about 1984 and these times we’re in?  I love George Orwell to distraction, but he gives me a blockage.

When you want the consolation of art, and not to figure out what it has to do with labor unrest in Wisconsin or the fate of Planned Parenthood, what can you read but Lolita?  When you are feeling mute, who better to remind you of the wondrous lexical depth and fecundity of the English language but Nabokov, the aforementioned Russian, writing of the aforementioned sex with children?  To whom could I turn for sweet release but Lolita (light of life, fire of loins, etc.)?

Ironic that a book full of death (cf. Amis) and sex with no question of offspring imbues this particular parched reader with a sense of renewal and intellectual fertility.  Of course, said renewal and fertility don’t necessarily translate to the speedy conception of pithy remarks about the book itself.  To produce even 600-1000 words on this novel in a hitherto un-utilized combination is a nervewracking proposition.

Tonight I will probably dream that a scowling Martin Amis is putting a cigarette out on my neck.  Or Nabokov himself will appear and tell me that he’s having a party but I’m not invited.  And that’s okay.  It’s like this with any novel, but with Lolita especially: it’s not what you can do for the book, but what the book can do for you.

Lolita has caused so many people to wring their hands and besiege librarians on behalf of those delicate blossoms, the children.  To be sure, it is a very disgusting book.  The rape of Lolita: “a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child,” after which the fiend Humbert buys “four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set,” and so on.

And then, “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently.  You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

This is viscerally horrible.  And yet this book, with its veritable panoply of horrors, is maybe the most bracing and perfect work of art I know.  Nabokov said “for me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.”  By that arresting measure, Lolita is a triumph, the ne plus ultra of the novel form.

Sometimes I get a little teleological in my interpretation of the world, but words are on my mind these days.  I went to a career fair for would-be linguists, wherein a lively presenter told the assembled that if we could give a snappy presentation in our target language, we had come to the right place.  Feeling inadequate to even a deeply un-snappy presentation in any language, I thought of Nabokov with wonder.

How might his want-ad read?  If you can write a prose miracle in the target language, this is the job for you.

Yet, Nabokov, in his own remarks on the novel, tells the reader

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled rich, infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

The author’s apologia for his linguistic shortcomings manages in one lengthy sentence to be finer than anything most “native illusionists” could muster.

Any reviewer of Nabokov is in danger of excessive quoting; it feels rather pointless not to let Nabokov do the talking.  Here’s Humbert on reproduction: “The tiny madman in his padded cell.”  Now Humbert on Humbert: “I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens.”

Just as he takes English and puts it through its paces, Nabokov, “trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy,” tells Americans of our vast spaces, our Hell canyons, our dusty cow paths:

Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities…

With Humbert and beleaguered Lo we pay our entrance fee (children under twelve free) to caves and gardens and ghost towns, the spectacular majesty and equally spectacular vulgarity of the American landscape, in which the compass ever swings from the sublime to the ridiculous.

What this book does for me, with its unparalleled linguistic verve, is remind me of what language and art can do.  Art restores us to life’s possibilities even as it offers solace from life’s trouble.  For Humbert, art is his and Lolita’s single mausoleum, their brilliant and grotesque offspring: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.”

Even if you’re not a mad pervert genius, for my money there’s no better refuge.

I think the storyline has percolated pretty well through the American cultural consciousness; I hadn’t read the novel until this year, but I knew of the titular choice.  Without giving it all away to the uninitiated, the novel is about a love triangle in Brooklyn in 1947: Stingo the callow Southerner, Nathan the manic Jew, and Sophie the beautiful Pole–a Holocaust survivor (and a Catholic).

I loved the first chapter of Sophie’s Choice, wonderful first-person stuff about a young Virginian trying to make it in the big city.  I had just finished The Moviegoer, and I was thinking this was kind of like The Moviegoer goes to New York.  I do, on occasion, love the self-deprecating, over-educated, over-sexed men of literature.  It would be downright un-American not to–they are the majority of our modern literary output.

I stayed up well past my bedtime to finish Sophie’s Choice.  I read its 500 pages in a day and a half.  I was gripped, to be sure; I laughed, cried, and so forth.  How could I not cry?  It’s about the Holocaust.

But upon completing the novel and reflecting a bit, I felt a little sleazy about the whole thing.  It’s not just about the Holocaust, for starters.  There are two main narratives at work in this sad and sensational story: Sophie’s Auschwitz horrors, and Stingo’s penile travails.  Yes–Sophie’s Choice is a My Dick novel par excellence.  These two narratives trot along side by side until the final chapter, when they converge in a seedy hotel room in Washington.  In this chapter Sophie reveals her horrible choice, and Stingo, hitherto afflicted with virginity, finally gets relief for his long-suffering member.

And what relief!  “The stiff prick slid in and out of that incandescent tunnel…Smothering for minute after minute in her moist mossy cunt’s undulant swamp.”  I’m not a prude; I think there should be sex in novels.  However, while I’m not certain how it is best achieved on the page, I feel quite certain that “mossy cunt” and “undulant swamp” are not the ideal epithets.  I mean, Jesus.  Also, it’s just so cheesy–the release of her secrets, the release of his orgasm.  It reminded me of the supremely ill-advised end of the film Munich, where the scenes of the athletes being shot to death alternate with scenes of Eric Bana in his sexual extremis.

I don’t wish to discount the agonizing reality of youth’s frustrated desire, or of our collective tortured relationship with sex–a vivid demonstration of the expression “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

I also know it’s a trope: young, inexperienced man taken in hand by a foxy, damaged older woman–his life changed forever.  I’ve read about it, notably in A Widow for One Year (which takes a fair number out of pages of Styron‘s book, I think).

It just strikes me as a shame that Sophie has to go to Auschwitz, and then come to America and get raped on the subway, and then get beat up and peed on by her unhinged boyfriend, and all the time her pal Stingo gives her his sympathy and his friendship and his stupendous boner.

Sophie’s walking up the stairs, down the stairs, to the Maple Court bar, carrying this immense sadness, and she’s also this walking amalgam of melons, peaches, hams.  She’s food, for God’s sake.  The “former starveling” with a residual iron deficiency, has got an ass like a “fantastic, prize-winning pear.”  I suspect that there are classier ways to express the ubiquity and complexity of sex in human experience.  Through Stingo’s narrative, we can’t help but see Sophie making her blonde, luscious way through the concentration camp, surrounded by leering lesbians and grabby third-reichers.

I am not insensible to the way that sex is tied up in everything.  I know we can’t put sex things in one box  (ahem) and our horrors and sadness into another.  And it’s on the record that William Styron was not insensible to Sophie’s uncomfortable position as a veritable grocery store of feminine delights.  Maybe he did want to leave us thinking about the razor’s edge that separates good, healthy libidinousness from the cold, rapey world.

Still, in detailing Sophie’s bottom, and Stingo’s youthful urges, and the confused role he played in the tragedy of it all, I’m not entirely sure if the novelist is aware of how grotesque it sometimes comes across. I’m not saying Stingo is implicated in her ruin or anything.  He’s not a Nazi; he’s a kid with a conscience and a boner.  I get it.  It’s not wrong to have a boner.  It’s just that the juxtaposition of elements in this story is such that, sometimes, it serves neither Styron’s art nor the gravity of his subject.

I said  the novel was a barnstormer and I meant it.  It’s an engaging read.  I think the primary reason I’m hung up on all the boner stuff is that stupid ending, which really drove home the fact that half the book was about said boner.  Maybe if Sophie’s big finale hadn’t started with that mossy swampy coitus, I wouldn’t be left musing on her pear-like posterior and how much Stingo wanted to squeeze it.  Maybe then I would be be thinking more about Sophie’s horrible choice, which was probably some real woman’s choice.  But then it wouldn’t have been so sensational, I guess.

My disinclination to read his books was such that I had to make myself a captive audience to get through this one.  Realizing that my job affords me a weekly fifteen hours during which I might listen to something, I put a recording of The Rainbow on the iPod, and erased everything else.

It took me a little while to get my bearings, since I’m unused to reading with my ears.  I wandered off during the first poetic flights, thinking about groceries, and marveling at D.H. Lawrence’s ability to communicate so graphically the idea of sex without using any of the words employed in the 21st century to discuss the subject.  

In spite of my initial wool-gathering, I found that listening made all the difference. The reader of my version had a weathered, spittle-rich voice with a very good sense of pace.  Previously, I might have read something like this and decamped for greener pastures:

Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. 

Trapped as I was, I started to really listen, lulled by her interesting voice and her knowledge of how the sentence should be read.

After several hours, I started to think that D.H. Lawrence had his hand in a lot of things.  Obviously, feelings.  I’ve never read a novelist so willing to go for broke, to agonizingly hash out people’s feelings, especially with regard to their traditional loci (sex, babies, sex, romantic discord, sex).  

Lawrence the novelist might have been a good person with whom to talk over a breakup ad nauseum, or a surprising same-sex interlude.  He might have made a good family therapist, although with perhaps a somewhat limited repertoire of solutions: “Your husband is jealous of the baby, madam. I suggest a babysitter for the evening.”

As I listened, I found he had things to say on a whole wealth of subjects.  Housing developments and coal towns, the countryside, modern education, smart house parties, and the virtues of staying in bed for the entire day with one’s lover.  He writes all these things in the context of how they make us feel.  I had written him off because I was put off by his poetic flights.  Thinking it over, I wondered how else one could write about all those feelings without a flight of some kind.  It is a puzzle.  

The relative marvel of Lawrence’s depiction of interior life was driven home when I watched Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio thrash around in Revolutionary Road, expressing with volume what they couldn’t express with anything else.  I felt embarrassed for them, and I was suddenly deeply aware of the poverty of film (and especially that film) when it comes to showing our interior lives.  Leonardo shouts “I don’t feel special” and does it with the typist, and Kate likewise shouts and embraces the neighbor.  

These people don’t have a chance against D.H. Lawrence (or Virginia Woolf), who has pages and pages to spend talking about the inside.  Lawrence is sometimes boring because hearing about other peoples’ feelings is sometimes boring, like hearing about their dreams.  And Lawrence seems too repetitive because people tend to have the same storms of feeling over and over, even if we should all know better.

It’s not all abandoned prose about womb-pangs and electric lights in the soul, either; sometimes Lawrence comes out with something snappy, like Anna thinking that  society is a “ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility.”

Still, though, I’m only a frail convert to Lawrence’s charms.  Back at home, I switched back to print for the last chapters and was confronted with the hard truth that I find some of his prose pretty painful:

He was a screen for her fears. He served her. She took him, she clasped him, clenched him close, but her eyes were open looking at the stars, it was as if the stars were lying with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming her at last. It was not him.

It’s just not my style.  But I’ve come to appreciate what he can do.  I am ready to go back to him; maybe I will fathom him at last.

For example, if anyone mentioned South Africa, I might recall Michener’s seminal work The Covenant, which I found a hotel in China and read on the train.  Then I could say  “The Broderbund, so evil, so sad,” and hope that the conversation ended soon.

I confess: all I know about Alexander the Great I learned from Mary Renault (and how).

That was then.  My life is different now; now I read with a notebook for writing down dates and important facts about caliphal succession.  I notice, and probably my classmates do also, that I am vague on the finer points of Important Things in History.  I sound, I suspect, like a person whose educational keystones are hundreds of novels, a shaky reading of Edward Said, and liberal blogs filled with rather broad humor.

Then again, perhaps a familiarity with novels does not leave one so unsuited for the study of history.  Evidently, many historical sources are novels of a type, except more boring.

I, Claudius is a special novel, one of my favorites.  Not only is it my go-to source for Roman history, it is a masterpiece of the form–the novel, I mean, not its degraded cousin, the historical novel.  I, Claudius is also sort of a miracle, something that Robert Graves, who identified as a poet, wrote simply as a way to make fast money.  The things I have done to make fast money include working in a toy store, answering lewd customer service emails, and editing someone’s college paper about the movie The Piano with Holly Hunter.

What Robert Graves did was read scores of historical texts in the original Latin and Greek.  He then used said texts to write a riveting first-person narrative about the history of Rome 44 B.C. to 41 A.D., subsequently making a boatload of money because it was so infinitely readable.  Then he wrote a sequel, Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina, a seamless continuation of the first book.  This is when people who wrote things other than Teen Paranormal Romance could get a contract for a sequel.  Imagine it.

All I know about Roman History I learned from Robert Graves, and it can be summed up as follows: Livia convinces Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire, to leave his first wife and marry her; she then uses her position of power to poison almost everybody.  Tiberius, meanwhile, is doing something so perverted they can’t even tell you what it is.  Common consensus holds Claudius the Stammerer (the narrator) a nitwit, but he is smarter than everyone and ends up in charge before marrying (for political reasons) his own awful bag who brings him down.  There is the eternal wrangle about whether Rome should be a Republic or have an Emperor, familiar to those of us who have seen the movie Gladiator.  

Romans had different ideas about family than modern people do, so everyone is constantly adopting adult children and marrying one another, which is sometimes confusing.  Furthermore, everyone has one of four possible names, plus some extras, in varying order, but Graves does a remarkable job of keeping it relatively simple.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God have the uncanny effect, true of other well-written historical fiction (I’m thinking specifically of Mary Renault’s Alexandriad, and among them, The Persian Boy) of sounding delightfully modern.  And it was written two thousand years ago, in 1934.  

For historians with a sense of perspective and the linguistic chops, ancient sources can feel alive.  For most of us without those things, reading translations with little or no context given or effort made to sex things up, primary sources are forbidding.  Robert Graves was patently a scholar–consider his massive cross-referenced mythological compendium, The Greek Myths.  He was also a great artist.  Some of us need Robert Graves or a person like him to read the sources, synthesize, and make them live.  James Michener doesn’t count; there’s a reason James Michener’s books are always getting left in hotel lobbies.

Knowing that Graves considered himself a poet foremost, I have tried to read his poetry, but prose is closer to my heart.  Graves’s (partial) autobiography Goodbye to All That is another one of my favorite books.  It describes his experiences at school and in World War I, in a wry, warm way.  It’s the perfect autobiographical writing, the sort that makes you wish the author was a personal friend.  

Then again, illustrating the eternal problem of historical sources and selective inclusion therein, I read (not in his autobiography) that Graves could be very grumpy, and had woman trouble.  But serious woman trouble, as in he had a long-standing menage-a-trois with his wife and another woman, and decided he liked his wife better, and the other woman threw herself out of the window.  Then he changed his mind about the wife and hobbled off with the other lady after her bones knitted together.  Kind of like a Roman! 

Except in Rome, his new paramour would have convinced him to exile the wife to a malarial island, so she would get a fever and die.  That’s history–you’ll find it in Graves.