December Books

the universe plus mind

I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, a catalogue of my last month’s reading cross-posted from johnpistelli.com. Please enjoy!

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Robert Boyers, Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner
Hey, did you know Susan Sontag was a total bitch? In case you didn’t, here’s another book about the subject. As someone who doesn’t think we need to toss even William S. Burroughs or Norman Mailer out of the canon for shooting and stabbing (respectively, though not respectfully) their wives, I really don’t lose any sleep about how mean Sontag was to cab drivers, journalists, or Robert Boyers. I find the fixation on this subject more than a bit frivolous. Then again, it’s my fault for even reading this overtly gossipy memoir by Boyers, the founder and editor of the distinguished journal Salmagundi, who knew both critics well in that capacity. Steiner was even less the monster than Sontag—was arguably more the monster on the page (“What theorem out of Africa?”) than he was in private life. The best Steiner anecdote in the book is about the time he wouldn’t shake Edward Said’s hand after Said had criticized him in The Nation: “I do not shake hands with scum,” he told the postcolonial critic, after which Said dryly remarked to Boyers, “That didn’t go very well.” I was also interested to discover that Steiner rated J. M. Coetzee’s novels very low, considering Coetzee’s relentless fictional exploration of Steiner’s own characteristic topoi: the relationship of language and literature to atrocity on one side and to the sacred on the other. Then again, maybe the very proximity of theme explains the critic’s distaste. The real question is not about whether Sontag and Steiner were “monsters”—they weren’t; they were just snooty and rude—but about whether they were “maestros”: about, that is, the status of the critic vis-à-vis the artist.

Mary Shelley, The Last Man
Mary Shelley’s other pioneering science fiction novel, this time a forerunner of the post-apocalyptic genre. (She was, however, a slight latecomer to the “last man” idea, incepted in the earlier 19th century.) If you thought The Road was depressing, try this. By the time Shelley was writing it, in the middle of the 1820s, Percy was dead, Byron was dead, her sister Fanny was dead, and three of her babies were dead. In my younger and more absolutist days, I scorned biographical readings of major literature, and I still mistrust them, but it’s impossible not to be moved when you consider how this writer, whose own mother died as a result of giving birth to her, lived this book, its status as science fiction notwithstanding. It’s too long, it’s too verbose, it’s not very well developed as a speculative premise, its characters are static and heraldic, its events are numbingly narrated rather than enchantingly dramatized, it’s full of 19th-century English ideology about gender and race, etc., etc., yes, yes, all that, but still: in projecting her Romantic life into an imagined late-21st-century England ravaged by plague, in turning a sequence of personal losses that would have destroyed almost anyone into a beautifully articulate fictional reverie, Shelley testifies almost in spite of herself to the compensations and consolations, such as they are, of art. If Frankenstein was elevated to its present eminence in the literary canon by feminists, The Last Man is presently being revived for its supposed relevance to “climate grief” and other such tiresome obsessions of the misanthropic anti-anthropocene cult, but I think that’s very much beside this book’s point. I’d read The Last Man instead for its first half’s lyrical portrait à clef of the the Romantic generation in their defeated idealism and for its second half’s epic sojourn through the devastated wastes first of England and then of all Europe, the rotting fields whose laborers have dropped where they toiled and the empty palaces where beggars throne themselves before the plague claims them:

London did not contain above a thousand inhabitants; and this number was continually diminishing. Most of them were country people, come up for the sake of change; the Londoners had sought the country. The busy eastern part of the town was silent, or at most you saw only where, half from cupidity, half from curiosity, the warehouses had been more ransacked than pillaged: bales of rich India goods, shawls of price, jewels, and spices, unpacked, strewed the floors. In some places the possessor had to the last kept watch on his store, and died before the barred gates. The massy portals of the churches swung creaking on their hinges; and some few lay dead on the pavement. The wretched female, loveless victim of vulgar brutality, had wandered to the toilet of high-born beauty, and, arraying herself in the garb of splendour, had died before the mirror which reflected to herself alone her altered appearance. Women whose delicate feet had seldom touched the earth in their luxury, had fled in fright and horror from their homes, till, losing themselves in the squalid streets of the metropolis, they had died on the threshold of poverty. The heart sickened at the variety of misery presented…

Shelley overdoes the misery, I want to say, the second half of the novel being one long, slow catalogue of death, but then her life overdid the misery, too, so it feels cruel to complain of only having to read about what she actually had to endure. I wouldn’t recommend The Last Man if you haven’t yet read Frankenstein or any of Percy’s or Byron’s poetry, and I wouldn’t recommend it as any kind of “pleasure read,” but I would recommend to anyone who wants to understand this literary period and this author better, including the ways in which it and she anticipate later periods and authors. So complete is this novel’s devastation that we are practically in Beckett’s cosmos, or Cormac McCarthy’s, by its conclusion, even if a 19th-century ethos of heroism, perhaps refreshing next to the 20th-century nihilism, remains. (It’s not a competition, nor is it relevant to literary merit, but Mary Shelley probably did have a harder life than Beckett or McCarthy, give or take the French Resistance and some largely self-imposed Appalachian poverty.) I also want to put in a word for the brilliant narrative frame: the Preface presents the novel as a free translation of a text found in many languages on scattered leaves by Mary and Percy when they were playing Mediterranean tourist in the cave of the Cumaean Sybil. In other words, this is as much prophecy as invention, our author akin to the prophetesses of old. Finally, the novel’s penultimate page reveals, in the voice of a narrator about to set sail from the depopulated European shore, what we can probably assume were also Mary Shelley’s desert-island choices: “I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare…” The Last Man is an epic and a tragedy that, if it falls just short of greatness, can in its intelligence and its plangency nevertheless sustain such company.

Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
Speaking of Mary Shelley, here is a Frankenstein story in many disparate parts. It’s like a thought experiment, except real: take a novel that is often a Shavian lecture on socialism and feminism and adapt it into a film devoted entirely to Wildean decadence and aestheticism. I’d always meant to read Alasdair Gray since an IRL friend told me a decade ago that my work reminded her of his. His 1992 novel, now a wildly unfaithful Yorgos Lanthimos film, is an extravaganza of texts-within-texts revising cultural archetypes for the postmodern moment, in this case Frankenstein and Pygmalion. Gray’s sincere-ironic tale of Victorian Glaswegian Dr. Godwin Bysshe Baxter’s “creation,” Bella Baxter, and of her world-spanning Bildung, nevertheless harbors a sincere meditation on socialism, feminism, and the Enlightenment, their end-of-history failures and continued possibilities, especially as the Enlightenment itself plausibly emerged in our author’s native Scotland.

“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us—it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”

I found the novel moving, stimulating, and clever, if very much of its history-burdened era in Brit Lit, the era of Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro and A. S. Byatt and Alan Moore (about whom more in a moment). Lanthimos, for his part, subtracts all the novel’s talk of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the Labour Party to dwell almost exclusively instead, in a surrealo-steampunk fantasia, on the sexual possibilities of sentimentally educating (I quote verbatim from the film) a “pretty retard.” In fact, if this isn’t an antediluvian conversation by now, the difference between book and film is precisely the difference between “left” and “woke,” the novel’s mournful public-minded concern for the civic and the social replaced in the film by a celebration of queer sex-work girlbossery, itself perhaps ironic in the post-woke style, as the ironic novel’s commitment to democratic socialism and Enlightenment (signified by Dr. Baxter’s first and middle names) never is, despite the post-historical moment of its composition. The novel is about contingency, irony, and solidarity; the film is about only contingency and irony. Gray’s Joycean ability to write in every style with aplomb, not to mention his admirable setting of his own type, saves the novel from its occasional reminiscence (to me) of a kind of Scottish Kurt Vonnegut, the abrasive discourse of a politically disappointed old man at once hectoring and facetious, just as the film’s potentially crass pornotopia is rescued by Emma Stone’s preternatural comic genius. I appreciated book and film together more than I would have appreciated either separately: like Shaw and Wilde, they complete each other.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
I only properly made Hesse’s acquaintance for the first time this year, frightened off as I’d been, even in my own adolescence, by his reputation as a writer for adolescents. This might be his most beloved novel, at least by the American counterculture. I found it a bit shaggy and shambolic and given over at its conclusion somewhat tiresomely to fantasy. I liked it a little less than I liked the fable-pure Tolstoyan simplicity of Siddhartha or the somber Dostoeveskean gnosticism of Demian. A novel of 1927, it not only reprises themes and motifs from Demian, most tantalizingly the idea of romancing one’s own androgynous doppelgänger, but extends its ambit to sex, dancing, and jazz clubs in its narrative of the titular lonely middle-aged intellectual’s learning to live, laugh, and love, with his self-division between respectable man and wild steppe-wolf. “Laugh” is the key word here. Despite the mild satire in my summary, the novel’s serious business is actually and interestingly, especially given the novel’s eve-of-destruction publication date, to undo the killing solemnity of German Romanticism. Our protagonist must learn to share in the detached and amused eternity of those the novel calls the “Immortals,” here represented by the classicism of Mozart and Goethe, rather than wallowing, indeed adolescently, in the howling protests against time exemplified in Beethoven and Kleist. A sympathetic version of Bildung and of occult initiation, then, except for the paradox that the novel itself is humorless and Romantic rather than lightsome and classical. Its best passages are essays: on the middling nature of the bourgeois, on the music-obsessed and irrational German character, and on the meaning of humanity itself.

Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute. “Man,” whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise. Convention rejects and bans certain of the more naked instincts, a little consciousness, morality and debestialization is called for, and a modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even thought necessary. The “man” of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the two of them. For this reason the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

I’d advise anyone unfamiliar with Hesse to start with the concise universal fables Siddhartha and Demian rather than the longer, wilder, but also more national Steppenwolf, though this is well worth reading too, especially if you are already familiar with the resources of German literature and culture upon which it draws. I am glad to have begun reading Hesse this year and look forward to what is supposed to be his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game.

Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III, Promethea
A normal person would have reread this 32-issue 1999-2005 comic-book series, Moore’s occult summa to date, before writing a novel about an occult comic-book writer, but I waited until I had finished writing Major Arcana, which no normal person could have written in any case. It began as a zany Wonder Woman pastiche, just one in a roster of self-created superhero comics Moore was writing at the time as part of his eventually abortive America’s Best Comics imprint, but Promethea somewhat notoriously became a pedagogical or even didactic lecture on occultism. Our mythic heroine tours both the Major Arcana of the Tarot and the sefirot of the Kabbalah for about a third of the series, reversing David Bowie’s station-to-station trajectory from Kether to Malkuth. When I first read the series as it was being published, a college student who was too immersed in Shakespeare and Joyce to bother with the occult, I was bemused and bewildered. Now that I’ve studied the subject a bit, I can see that Moore’s tour of the astral plane takes place essentially under the aegis of Aleister Crowley’s concepts and theories. This is helpful for me. While I own a Thoth Tarot deck and sometimes even use it, I never did get around to reading Crowley’s Book of Thoth and never may, being impatient with magic’s tediously system-obsessed mirroring of the modern rationalism it ostensibly opposes. Moore and his artist collaborator, J. H. Williams III, bring good humor, emotional amplitude, and formal bravura to the Tree of Life for those not quite committed to serious occult erudition. As for the rest of the series, the parts not concerned to lecture us on the nature and purpose of the universe, its fascination lies in what is Moore’s obvious, ambivalent riposte to the Vertigo fantasy series he himself helped to inspire, Sandman and The Invisibles. Moore’s commitment to narrative formalism is too severe, his attempts at humor too labored, to rival Gaiman and Morrison on these grounds; they’re really much better at the romance of pure pop narrative, even if they could never plumb the depths or mount the heights of Watchmen and From Hell. Moore’s roster of female Promethea incarnations is a charming company, but their dialogue consists almost entirely of exaggerated arch and campy banter, like 1980s sitcom heroines. It is as if the writers of The Golden Girls and Designing Women had adapted Blake’s Jerusalem. And the series goes astray toward its conclusion, when our heroine descends from Kether so that Moore can make strained commentaries on post-9/11 politics down here in Malkuth. Moore’s celebrated formal inventions don’t always work either, as when the two snakes on Promethea’s staff explicate the Tarot to her in an entire issue’s worth of execrable heroic couplets, the often butchered pentameter no great advertisement for mystic wisdom. The wisdom itself sometimes eludes me too, as when the central mythic image of love we’re given in the Kabbalistic sphere of what else but “Wisdom” is Pan raping Selene. “It’s almost like she wanted that,” our heroine helpfully explains, perhaps validating some readers’ hesitation before the ancient archetypes posited by the occult worldview. Nevertheless, Williams’s visual inventiveness combined with Moore’s literary contrivances usefully introduce modern esoterica in some of its most popular forms to readers who might otherwise be unfamiliar with it, and in an often funny and touching narrative. The climactic “end of the world,” when we really learn to live in the world more richly and more lovingly, communicates genuine immemorial wisdom. Not Moore’s best work, but one of his most crucial.

Image: Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III, Promethea #22 (2002)