This year The New York Times Book Review celebrates 125 years of doing just that which its title suggests. During that time, one may imagine it has made and broken enough writers, made many a reader’s heart beat faster, and some to break – over person or product of passion. Enough books lauded, quickly to be relegated to obscurity; some dismissed – or simply missed – now with a place in the realm of classic; but often simply the right words found at the right time – by reviewer and reviewed alike.
There are probably reasons not to have a NYT subscription, but an interactive pieces like this, which in tracing the years of the Book Review also, by the by, passes review on the changing cultural parade of a whole century plus some years more, and Paral Sehgal’s essay “Reviewing the Book Review”, are not amongst them!
There will surely be much more to look forward to during the year as The Review dives into its archives and appraises its history, and considers its role in the complicated literary and cultural present and in the ensuing years.
With the success of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half last year (which I wrote about here), it could hardly surprise that Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel would resurface and be talked about again, and therefore appropriate that Bennett be at the centre of this T Book Club event.
Not just about Passing, Brit Bennett also speaks on the person Nella Larsen, beyond the writer, and the complicated paths her life took. After years of obscurity – the NYT famously overlooked her death in 1964 – Larson was rediscovered by feminist academics during the 1970s, and given place amongst the (mostly male) Harlem Renaissance. Interest in Larsen has been sustained through the ensuing years, including what Darryl Pinckney calls a definitive biography in 2006 by George Hutchinson, which he reviewed at The Nation upon publication. I mention the biographical information (via Pinckney and Wiki) only because, it seems to me, the oddness – or, the inconsistencies – of Larson’s life are not dissimilar to those to be discerned in the novel.
Three African American women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, ca. 1925
But, that is the thing with the unreliable; it titillates, seduces and ultimately leaves –has to leave – some things unresolved. And so it is with the voice of Nella Larsen speaking to us through Irene Redfield. I recall Brit Bennett mentioning Irene’s world to be a rare example of a historical depiction of middle-class Black America, and it is this term “middle-class” that perplexes me; but that is generally so, for its definition is very dependent upon context – in place and in time – and neither being American nor clear on the historical demographics of New York, I may have a different understanding of a socio-economic scale. And so I am left to be wowed at what a middle-class that must have been in Harlem in the 1920s! The Redfieds for instance: doctor, wife; juggling social calendar and committees; entertaining and being entertained by literary luminaries; trips abroad, private schools; upstairs, downstairs; separate bedrooms (which I mention because of the spatial factor – what it says about the relationship between Irene and Brian is another matter!); housemaid, cook. Many of these are attributes I find difficult to relate to the middle-classes – somewhat too uppity, to my mind! Is the Harlem of her novel that in which Nella Larsen lived, the society to which she aspired? Or has she over-imagined both?
Only a few days ago I completed reading, in German translation, Sue Prideaux’s quite wonderful Nietzsche biography I am Dynamite! Explosive is it not, neither in the physically reactive sense nor posing as celebrity exposé, but rather a fabulously choreographed display of fireworks in a night sky – tantalising in sight and sound, a vivid array playing against the dark expanse; up there with a whoosh, brilliant and pointed in the ascent, hanging tenuously in the heavens, then falling fast and with a fizz, fading to nothing…
Should God be dead, nothing beckons from an afterlife thus denied, but neither Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche nor his legacy are nothing.
Like many – or most – I have not read Nietzsche and, like just about as many, those thoughts I have had in passing have been heavily compromised by the association of his person and philosophy with Hitler and Nazis and everything that implies – a false premise it now seems clear to me, neither of his making nor intent. Also, I should say, I have been just as aware of enough voices over the years pleading a case for Nietzsche and seeking to free him from the abuses of history, but these included complex philosophical arguments beyond most (read as: me!), and so one is (again, read as: I am!) left with the baggage of Halbwissen.
Pub. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
For that reason I don’t dare delve too deep here, but because I enjoyed reading it so much, I must put down some words of recommendation, and insist that Prideaux’s book is absolutely not an academic philosophical treatise, though the philosophy is there for those who wish to look, and only demands an interest in the subject – sympathy for him is assured to follow; for all but the most hardened anti-Nietzchean.
No, not sympathy for the devil, but for a long dead, white man (characteristics seriously out of vogue!) of stellar intellect; an original thinker and non-conformist who struggled with physical and mental disabilities most of his life (the precise nature of which remain unclear), burdened with a despicable family – most especially sister Elisabeth, so instrumental in the perversion of his ideas and work. And charming and funny he could be – I’m sure Prideaux didn’t invent these traits; she found them and relays them on to her readers.
Should God be dead, what is there but to live a life; joyful and rich in experience and pleasures. And these pleasures Nietzsche seeks, in his writing life, in the choices he makes, and the friendships he fosters.
In speaking of these friendships, it is interesting that threesomes seemed to play an important part in Nietzsche’s life – and were always doomed to failure; whether with his mother and sister or in his relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paul Rée. (How I want to believe Andreas-Salomé could have saved him, but probably not.) But what I found especially fascinating, was the saga (it had to be a saga I suppose!) surrounding Nietzsche’s quite extraordinary friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner. So wonderfully rendered by Prideaux; to be imagined, the brilliance of this triumvirate and their quest for a Dionysian alternative to the rational Zeitgeist. Alas, short-lived; away from the idyllic Tribschen, and driven by their conceits and obsessions with all things Bayreuth, the Wagners’ anti-Semitic, anti-French, even anti-European sentiments, which had increasingly irritated Nietzsche, are intensified to embrace a virulent German nationalism that was contrary to all the cultural ideals to which the three had once aspired. Conspired. Suffice to say, it becomes clear that the relationship is not going to end well, and it doesn’t.
“The Custom of the Country” by Edith Wharton (1913)
Edith Wharton, if she was ever out of vogue, is now very much ‘in’ again – talked and written about, her stories adapted to screen. Not so long ago I wrote about House of Mirth, and have recently been prompted (see the embedded video) to read her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country; and, unlike the aforesaid and The Age of Innocence both of which I know well, for the first time.
A conversation with Claire Messud about Edith Wharton & “The Custom of the Country”
Written a dozen or so years after House of Mirth, the general contours of The Custom of the Country remain the same – powerful female heroines (are they?) and splendid (or splendidly despicable?) supporting characters; embedded in that particular East Coast milieu of the Gilded Age into which one is either born or gains admittance at great cost, and a graceful exit doomed to fail. But, however overtly similar, it would be wrong to suggest that Wharton is limited in her vision, locked within the same familiar template; for this later novel very well demonstrates how her own path in the ensuing years, culminating in a divorce and self-decreed exile on the other side of the Atlantic, informed her writing life. And despite affinities shared, Wharton’s heroines in these two novels are in opposite trajectories – in House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s once promising outlook is hurtling towards a tragic end, whilst in The Custom of the Country, the irrepressible Undine Spragg is on the ascendant – life as a series of career moves.
Undine is an anti-heroine I would say, a protagonist without virtue – beyond her beauty, feted by some and envied by all – and ruthless in her pursuit of advancement in society; resolute she is for sure, but vacuous and amoral. In a young nation, a hierarchy has already been established – between old money and new, inherited and earned. And though Undine may slip up or miss a step as she ascends the social ladder, when all seems lost, she (unlike Lily Bart) always manages to regain control and live for another day.
The title of the book is not peripheral, and does suggest one of the novel’s main themes – how class structures and behavioral norms operate in different countries. (A Wikipedia entry gives another interpretation, the veracity of which I can not confirm.) Customs are to be adhered to, or challenged, or simply ignored, and Undine successfully adapts each as befits a situation. Abiding to custom, often means deception, improvisation, manipulation; all wiles to which she is adept. Undine marries when she will, and divorces likewise; she keeps company that she shouldn’t for all to see or closeted from the prying eye; when in one place she pines for another, and then another. And that money grows on trees, is for her not an adage, but a wife’s expectation. More generally, there is a way of recognising her actions as a product of the custom of man (and country); as proffered by a Mr. Charles Bowen in a conversation with Mrs. Fairford (Undine’s sister-in-law), which I quote in length because it says so much:
“[…]you say his wife’s extravagance forces him to work too hard; but that’s not what’s wrong. It’s normal for a man to work hard for a woman—what’s abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it.”
“…But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man’s again—I don’t mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in THEM […]
“Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she’s so important to them that they make it worth her while! She’s not a parenthesis, as she is here—she’s in the very middle of the picture. I’m not implying that Ralph isn’t interested in his wife—he’s a passionate, a pathetic exception. But even he has to conform to an environment where all the romantic values are reversed. Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman’s drawing-room or in their offices? The answer’s obvious, isn’t it? The emotional centre of gravity’s not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business…”
The Custom of the Country, Chapter XV, Kindle Edition (location 1856-65)
Over the last year or so I have been diligently, albeit intermittently, following through with a series of edX courses on the American Civil War and the years of Reconstruction in its aftermath; the consequences of which resound to this day.
Delivered by Columbia University and Prof. Eric Foner; a lengthy but incredibly enlightening intellectual pursuit that I can highly recommended to anyone interested in this defining period of US history – I only realise now how very much that is so (not to mention how ignorant I was!).
Born February 18th, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison would have celebrated her 90th birthday today. She won’t be doing that of course, but very many far and wide will give pause for thought this day and raise a glass in her honour, and remember a most remarkable writer and woman.
…The questions [posed in a 2002 lecture] seem wholly relevant : “To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”
In everything Morrison wrote, she offered narratives that revealed the journeys of characters, specific but universal, flawed and imperfect, with a deeply American desire for freedom and adventure. One might say that because her characters were almost exclusively African-American, the quest to be free — in mind, body and spirit — was the consistent adventure. She was also a masterful crafter of windows; when you opened a book of hers, the worlds you entered were so rich with detail, you could feel the molecules around you change as if you’d just taken a long flight and were descending onto the tarmac in a town or city where you’d never been…
Veronica Chambers, The New York Times, Feb. 18 2021
The fine introduction by Veronica Chambers leads on to a selection of works, each accompanied by equally thoughtful text. For those, especially younger people who are encountering Toni Morrison for the first time, perhaps at college or of their own volition, the piece offers some guidance as to where to start, and for us others a reminder to return to Morrison again and again, and find in one of her stories or essays that which we only now “get” with the passing of time and an accumulation of knowledge and experience.
To continue the thread. Carol King was born Carol Joan Klein. Such is the train of my thoughts: the squint of an eye to thread through another. To where does this lead, what awaits at eye’s other end? Another Klein has been on my mind.
Off the top of my head, I can’t quite remember when and where I first encountered stuff from the young Ezra Klein; but it was certainly pre-Obama, therefore before he migrated to The American Prospect at the end of 2008, and he was most certainly one of the most interesting (and youngest!) of the first generation of political bloggers. Always on my radar, through his tenure at the Washington Post to the founding (with others) of Vox, and last November brought news of his hiring by The New York Times.
And so it is that I have a new must read to add to my fluctuating (some have been known to fall out of favour!) list, and to date it has absolutely not disappointed. Already, some really excellent pieces focusing on the dangers ahead; from Covid-19 variants, for the Democrats should they rest on their laurels, should the failing political system and specifically the Senate not be reformed. Klein’s critical reflection on the problems (and liberal failings) crippling his home state of California is a highlight. Beyond the weekly opinion pieces, there is a twice weekly podcast (with full transcripts) that appear to be related and, after only a few weeks a wonderful mix of guests; including his Opinion desk colleague, Paul Krugman. Unafraid to go beyond his comfort zone, his talk with Yuval Levin about the future of the GOP is a master-class in intelligent, respectful conversation with those not of one’s own political persuasion. You may say they are peddling their wares (both have newly released, and big-time talked about books), but I could have listened all day to what Elizabeth Kolbert and Heather McGhee had to say. Only because it is the most recent, below is the conversation with the latter on Spotify, from whence the earlier episodes can be navigated to.
Ezra Klein talks with Heather McGhee on his NYT podcast
Returning to where I began, Ezra’s Typepad blog from the mid-noughties is still to be found out there on everyone’s favourite “forget nothing” machine (not to mention this foodie blog that he participated in – I even remember that!), and now I am fairly sure it was there that I began reading his earnest, geeky, political junkie commentary (and that of others – the Blogroll is like a blast from the past!), and which comes to an end in the year 2008 and Klein’s move to The American Prospect. What followed from then on seems to have been a career mostly in the ascendant. Half his luck, I say. The “good life” well earned. I’ve always found Ezra (everyone calls him Ezra!) to be an extraordinarily intelligent and thoughtful young man, and will enjoy accompanying him into his middle-age at NYT, just as I slink into the much older version. (Though I do note he doesn’t seem to stay in one place for too long!)
…when first we practice to deceive!” (Sir Walter Scott, 1808)
From Carol King to “Emerson, Lake & Palmer” is not as far as one would think. In the same year as Tapestry, “Emerson, Lake & Palmer” released their second studio album, Tarkus, from which the following track titled “Mass” is pulled. And, it too, lends itself to an extended metaphor of the power of the weave.
The song’s relevance on this, the day after Trump got a second (and expected) reprieve in the Senate in the wake of his second impeachment is obvious. To emphasise my point, I have transcribed the lyrics.
“Mass”, Keith Emerson & Greg Lake
Mass - Emerson Lake & Palmer (Tarkus,1971)
The preacher said a prayer
Save every single hair on his head
He's dead
The minister of hate had just arrived too late to be spared
Who cared?
The weaver in the web that he made
The pilgrim wandered in
Commiting every sin that he could
So good
The cardinal of grief was set in his belief he'd be saved
From the grave
The weaver in the web that he made
The high priest took a blade
To bless the ones that prayed
And all obeyed
The messenger of fear is slowly growing, nearer to the time
A sign
The weaver in the web that he made
A bishops rings a bell
A cloak of darkness fell across the ground
Without a sound
The silent choir sing and in their silence
Bring jaded sound, harmonic ground
The weaver in the web that he made
- "Mass" - music and lyrics by Keith Emerson & Greg Lake
