Weekly Readings #122 (06/03/24-06/09/24)

the contract you made with yourself

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

Subscribers to and followers of Grand Hotel Abyss have increased since last week’s announcement, so welcome one and all! I should put together some kind of comprehensive but brief introduction to myself to make sense of my decade-long internet presence and writing career, but I prefer to embrace the chaos. (Like James Joyce, I ask only that you spend your life whole life reading my work.)

But if you are new here and wondering who I am and what I’m about, my appearance from one year ago on Daniel Oppenheimer’s Eminent Americans podcast is a good place to start. The “who I am and what I’m about” part is halfway through the pod, after the discussion of Wesley Yang. The little essay I wrote about the fallout of the Yang conversation is also a good introduction to my whole thing.

Speaking of last week’s announcement, I remind you that the soon-to-be collector’s item self-published first edition of my new novel Major Arcana will remain for sale on Amazon in print and Kindle editions only until the end of the month. After that, you’ll have to wait for the Belt Publishing edition in April 2025—a more polished text, a text of a veritable high gloss. (There’s also the original Substack serial for paid subscribers, which will remain up indefinitely.) Major Arcana has already been called “breathtaking,” “exhilarating,” and “the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.” I will as ever send a free pdf of the novel to anyone who wants one in exchange for an honest review in a public forum; please just email me at the address in my bio or DM on Substack. If you do write a bad review, be sure it’s one of those bad reviews that makes everyone to want to read the book.¹

Finally—I’ll keep the self-promotion briefer next time, but I really do have a lot of new people today—the big project here at Grand Hotel Abyss right now is The Invisible College: a series of literature courses (i.e., a literature podcast) for paid subscribers. We recently wrapped up a survey of modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, an unrivaled archive of material on those figures in “the podcast space.” Now we’re on our summer reading project: eight weeks on James Joyce, with a six-week focus on Ulysses, with four weeks to follow on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the fall: American literature from Romanticism to modernism, from Emerson and Poe to Stevens and Faulkner, complete with a three-week immersion in Moby-Dick. My most recent episode on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my favorites. Please subscribe today!

I still maintain a Tumblr I started 12 years ago when all cool writers were briefly adopting that platform before its well-known problems drove them away.² I like Tumblr because it’s a black box; it offers no stats or any other metrics beyond likes and follows, themselves relevant only to Tumblr’s own peculiar pocket-universe. I feel as if I have that platform to myself, so people ask me questions on there, and I try to answer as candidly as I can. I assume no one’s reading it—I’d prefer if no one were reading it—so I sometimes repost the answers on here. So it will be today.

I rather irrelevantly and unreasonably typed a two-part review of Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (2022), a memoir of the author’s mentorship by Elizabeth Hardwick and of the whole rest of the ’70s and ’80s literary scene in New York, into two of those Tumblr responses. I repost the whole thing below with a few edits and footnotes, since I suspect those who would like it on Substack haven’t read it. Please enjoy!

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You Said You Would: On A Literary Education

Dominique Nabokov, Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment (1995)

My decision to write about Pinckney’s memoir was sparked by a question from an anonymous commenter:

If a wealthy benefactor-patron handed you enough for you and any dependents you have to live on, would you stop writing criticism (or do less) and focus on your fiction?

Related question — how are the play and the comic³ coming along?

I responded thusly: Probably I’d do less, though I’ve scaled it back now to my weekly newsletter and some reviews of new books I’ve been working on recently. The problem with criticism is that you become a prisoner of your opinions. People like me who are both artists and critics are using criticism to “create the taste by which they are to be enjoyed,” which is legitimate, but one also enjoys all sorts of things. I already said somewhere, maybe in a Substack comment, that I recently read Less Than Zero and really loved it. You might not guess that I would like that book based on my criticism, but I did like it. I don’t always like that “type,” but the individual work, in his case the work of a glamorously feverish nightmare, was beautiful. I said this in my essay on Adler’s Speedboat:

When we say what kind of fiction we prefer—or proclaim from on high the only kind that should be written—we are trying to legislate for the worst-case scenario: which type of novel would I prefer to read given a choice of two bad novels—aleatory autobiography or plotted realism? Genre judgments of all sorts betray literature by assuming failure in advance and trying to blunt its effects with the guard rails of a predetermined aesthetic.

I’m thinking about that because I’m currently reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, a novel (or whatever) in the same aesthetic-historical climate as Speedboat, and disliking it, and reading, and very much liking, Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September, a long, gossipy memoir of Hardwick and a lot of other people.⁴

(How did I get to Hardwick? I’d been meaning to read Pinckney’s book—I love the essay that must have been the germ of it, sent to me years ago by longtime friend-of-the-blog Matthew St. Ville Hunte—but I think what really encouraged me was the new Flannery O'Connor movie Wildcat, where Hardwick is unjustly played as something of an airhead⁵ by a young-Millennial actress best known for starring in an MTV series based on the Scream movies.)

Both books, the one by and the one about Hardwick, capture a world that is totally, irrevocably gone, one where many people do seem to have enjoyed some kind of permanent income that is no longer available—or maybe it was just how much cheaper the rent was—and they do seem to have mooned around in their New York artists’ lofts writing one book review a month, pecking away at a slim experimental autobiographical novel, teaching a class or two and showing up drunk for it.

Unlike today’s New York literati who have re-canonized Hardwick in recent years, I don’t really mourn that world—maybe because I never had a chance in it; maybe it’s just what the kids call cope—and think most of its writers are pretty minor.⁶

(Yes, and here come my imprisoning opinions again, Hardwick is pretty minor. If it’s any consolation to the feminists, I think the same⁷ of her noble, mad, and monstrous sometime husband.)

As for focusing on my fiction, I am of the opinion (again!) that you don’t want to write too many novels. Each one should be special: an event. I don’t experience writer’s block so much as periods when I lack a workable idea for a novel. When I get a workable idea, I write the novel, usually pretty fast. The play and the comic are swirling around in my mind; I’m not quite sure what they’ll turn into. Something about cities, the city, the dream of the city—something not far from what Pinckney in his youth was seeking in Hardwick’s apartment-atelier. The Invisible College is taking up more of my mental energy than I thought it would, not to mention that people are paying for it; so for now, that comes first.

(By the way, if you, anon, are yourself considering this act of benefaction—let’s say a million or two—I am willing, within reason, to be guided by your advice in this area. As Emily Gilmore once said, “Everything is for sale.”)⁸

Summertime sadness, personal photo. I blocked the license plate, but it was a variation on the phrase “sad girl.” Posted here because I suspect she’s read Sleepless Nights: “It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now.”

The week after I wrote the above, someone asked what nonfiction I recommended. After saying I don’t read nonfiction and don’t recommend any—okay, I recommended Richard Ellmann’s trilogy of biographies of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde; Jill Lepore’s one-volume U.S. history These Truths; Louis Menand’s intellectual history of American Pragmatism The Metaphysical Club; and Gillian Rose’s incomparable memoir Love’s Work—I picked up the thread of Pinckney’s book again:

I just finished Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s long and exhaustive memoir of Elizabeth Hardwick, the New York Review of Books set, and the downtown NYC avant-garde in the ‘70s and '80s. It contains very rich gossip. Pinckney even quotes a defense of gossip in its pages: Hardwick and Barbara Epstein used to say that gossip is only analysis of the absent person.

The climax, if such a diffuse book can have a climax, comes when Susan Sontag realized on the Kantstraße a few months before the Wall came down that Pinckney kept a diary. She decided to tell him for posterity’s sake a story about the time Robert Lowell, then married to Hardwick, made a pass at her, with the excuse that “One can’t have one’s wife writing Madame Bovary in the kitchen.” Sontag or Pinckney—the voices aren’t always distinct in this group memoir—observed that Cal and Lizzie employed domestic service of the type eulogized or matronized in Sleepless Nights, so she wouldn’t have been writing in the kitchen. She would have been writing in the study—just like him. Nevertheless, the two real geniuses they knew, Hardwick and Epstein conclude after thinking about it for a while, were Lowell and Arendt.

Pinckney is good on the paradoxes of being educated out of one’s class, especially in an America where race and ethnicity can be proxies for class; he can only talk about James Baldwin insightfully with this old Southern white woman of extraordinary literary cultivation, not his black bourgeois parents with their too-middle-class investment in respectability.

The climax of the book might be Baldwin’s funeral, come to think of it. There, Pinckney, who has presented himself throughout as a reticent and deferential protégé, takes no prisoners:

Maya Angelou sounded like a Hallmark card. Toni Morrison spoke mostly about herself. Baraka ranted about white people. The relief of a choir.

This book put a couple more memoirs and biographies on the notional to-read list: The Big Sea by Langston Hughes, Safe Conduct by Boris Pasternak—though I should probably read Dr. Zhivago first—and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess by Arendt herself. A quotation in conclusion from Picnkney’s lavishly narrated bildung:

Elizabeth had a way of talking to young writers that assumed we understood what was involved in the production of: anything. Part of what made her such a powerful example that a writing life was possible for you, too, was that she took your anxieties seriously. But all problems about writing had one solution: you had to, you said you would, it was the contract you made with yourself, it was your life.

1. Like when the Verso critic denounced Madeline Cash’s “reactionary aesthetic” last year and caused everyone to buy her small-press debut story collection. (My capsule review of Cash’s book is here—scroll to the bottom. Substack’s own ARX-Han has released a podcast reflecting on the incident one year later.) Or like Andrea Long Chu’s summary critique of Ottessa Moshfegh, which elevated Moshfegh in my estimation as a classic American writer invested in the classic American writer’s true and perennial politics, what one of my commenters recently analyzed as crypto-conservative apolitical left-libertarianism. Chu didn’t totally persuade me to read Moshfegh’s medieval outing, though. Henry James’s advice still applies, which is why I quote it all the time: all else being equal, the novelist’s best subject matter is “the present palpable intimate,” not the Middle Ages.

2. The only cool writer who ever followed me on there was Chelsea Hodson. She probably wouldn’t follow me these days since I once replaced Tonight I’m Someone Else with Major Arcana in the Kendall Jenner pic that sometimes accompanies anxious think-pieces about the “hot-girlification” of reading. Mea culpa.

3. I’ve promised somewhere or in several places to write a Beckett- or Sarah Kane-like play based on the non-relationship between Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia (projected title: Saturn Dreaming of Mars) and a graphic novel about a dys- and utopian charter-city future where aesthetes wage aesthetic war (projected title: Kosmitora). Something like these projects will materialize, though I’ve already said that they—especially the latter—may turn into novellas or novels.

4. Pinckney includes a lot of personal photos, but I’ve only included one personal photo in this post.

5. Then there’s the airheadification of the experimental writer. I refer to Emily Wilson’s endlessly condescending review of Anne Carson in The Nation. Wilson judges Carson’s avant-garde pieces as frivolous, her narrative pieces as hackneyed, her translations as inaccurate, and her essays as unscholarly. If you’re reading casually, you might think it’s a friendly mixed review, but it’s a total demolition job.

I have my own misgivings about Carson; I wrote about them last year in a little essay I called “Flowers for Aletheia,” built, like the present post, out of Tumblr fragments. There I quoted from Terry Nguyễn on Carson as Tumblr poet, which may have inspired Wilson’s opening gambit, the comparison of Carson to Rupi Kaur.

But Wilson’s complaints would not be my own: “her book is fundamentally anti-academic and anti-historicist,” writes Wilson about one of Carson’s works. I can think of no higher compliment. Print that on the back of the book! Carve it on her tombstone! Then we get the “privileged white woman” routine, as if the mere fact of social inequality—the absolute remediation of which history offers no example—obligated the writer to write about nothing else. This criticism is in conflict with the complaint that Carson is not academic enough, betraying perhaps radical academics’ increasingly not-so-secret conviction that their own expert class is the only true revolutionary class.

In contrast with Wilson, I think Carson should have pursued the preternatural narrative gift evidenced in early works like “The Glass Essay,” Autobiography of Red, and The Beauty of the Husband, rather than taking the more Steinian route toward anti-mimesis and vanguardist gimmickry. Guy Davenport, introducing “The Glass Essay,” compared Carson to Tolstoy for sheer limpidity and drive of storytelling. If you have such a gift, you should use it.

In a very friendly way, I here disagree with the great Sam Kahn about the value of narrative. Serious literature’s abandonment of narrative has coincided with society’s abandonment of serious literature. As I said in my Speedboat essay linked above: all literary devices are artifices and contrivances, impositions of order on the recalcitrance of reality. Plot is no more or less a contrivance than any other—than the artful sentence or the careful montage or the attempt at mimesis of actual time. “Life’s not like that,” we say of plotted narratives and dramas. But life’s not like any art, to life’s eternal detriment, or not always. Some days are like Chekhov, but some days are like Dickens. Plot, moreover, is literature’s most totalizing way to interpret reality, its version of the philosophical treatise’s thesis—a recreation of the order of the world in language as an articulation of what the writer believes that order to be—and therefore its best way of competing with theory for attention, distinction, and priority.

6. Worrying about major and minor may be no more than a parlor game and then again may be the heart of the matter. It’s a little better than worrying about awards. Speaking of awards and parlor games, somebody asked me, “What’s the best novel to win the Booker?” I responded: According to my official calculations, I have read about a quarter of the Booker-winning novels (and more like a third of Booker-winning authors). The ones I read were almost all good-to-great—except for Amsterdam; what were they thinking there?—so it’s hard to decide. Midnight’s Children, The Remains of the Day, Possession, Disgrace, True History of the Kelly Gang, Milkman…an embarrassment of riches, early and late. I even retain my stubborn undergraduate affection for The English Patient. I must get off my arse (they never should have started giving it to Americans) and read Oscar and Lucinda, The Famished Road, The Line of Beauty, The White Tiger, and, yes, Prophet Song next. (I’ve never read anything by Paul Lynch, but I like what he had to say here—very “romantic realism,” though he calls it “cosmic realism.”) The best of those I read? I have no argument against the critics who twice awarded Midnight’s Children the Booker of Bookers; it’s an exhilarating and world-historical tragic mock-epic. The two Coetzees are also undeniable and unforgettable contemporary classics. But I think for myself these days I have to go with The Sea, the Sea. Please leave your own answers in the comments.

7. A passage possibly worth revisiting from that essay on Robert Lowell I wrote in 2019, when Madeline Cash and Honor Levy were still in preschool (I exaggerate for effect):

Modern art is reactive, which is why it is revolutionary. The embourgeoisement of marginality’s signifiers, of the nose ring, the tattoo, the blue-dyed hair, the superhero comics and the horror movies, and the aesthetics of queerness and blackness in general, is the ideological crisis of our age. Whatever was once fresh and vital in a range of rebellious midcentury writing, from Lowell and Bishop to Ginsberg and Kerouac to Baldwin and O’Connor to Le Guin and Delany to Shirley Jackson and early Marvel Comics, has now, along with Marvel’s intellectual property itself, become boring, middlebrow, middle class, suburban, and profitable to the present power structure. Aesthetes (and almost all political radicals whatever their politics are aesthetes in denial) won’t be bored—if necessary, they won’t-be-bored to death. And people wonder why the new avant-gardes, like the old ones, are illiberal.

Relatedly, please see friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith’s latest essay in Tablet on Kristeva and Céline, a plea to take total and totalizing desire out of politics and restore it to literature, where it belongs.

8. An anon asked me: “If someone were to accuse you of being a psyop, what would they accuse you of?” I wrote: I would be accused—I sometimes even am accused—of running the opposite of the psyop I’m actually running. This is because, in true psyop fashion, I sometimes used to openly claim to be running the opposite psyop of the one I actually was/am running. I’ve even darkly hinted that it’s worse than you think, just to throw you off the track, but also to keep you coming back for more. (Deep lore: how would someone with crazy eyes, red yarn, pushpins, and a corkboard get from me to Michael Aquino in two steps? I revealed the answer once, only once, behind Katherine Dee’s paywall, on my first ever podcast appearance, during which Kat and I correctly predicted in 2021 that the dissident right would become the next iteration of neoconservatism, years before a straight line could be drawn from BAP through Anna K. to Bari Weiss.) I could say more, but then it wouldn’t be a psyop, would it? If you’re desperate for a clue as to what’s really going on here: I hate to direct you behind another paywall, but please see, speaking of deep lore, my commentary on P. B. Shelley’s esoteric reading of the literary canon in the Invisible College episode “Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise.”