June Books

exit eden

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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The Book of Job
I read some books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Songs—before I decided to read the whole Norton Critical Old Testament this year; on the other hand, I’ve read some for the first time in this very volume. Some of the latter were revelations—Samuel, Kings—and some were (make way for the lightning bolt) bores—Deuteronomy, Chronicles. I’ve read Job two or three times before, but never in its proper place: after the Biblical histories. It seems to be in the wrong book—the wrong library, that is. Even Norton editor Herbert Marks notes its lack of Hebrew cultural connotation, its setting in the vague “east.” Indeed, it feels closer to the Bhagavad Gita than anything that precedes it in this book—but also, moving west, closer to the Iliad, to Aeschylus, to Sophocles. This was the only book of the Hebrew Bible Simone Weil admired; she judged the rest too caught up, like the Romans would be later, in chosen-people national-imperial chauvinism, whereas Job’s attention to suffering and mystery possesses by contrast a luminous Homeric compassion. Carl Jung thought Job represented a productive crisis in Judeo-Christian religion: the first calling of the almighty to moral account, the first intimation of malice and therefore of psychological completeness in the godhead: The Book of Job integrates God’s shadow. (This slights the complexities of Genesis, it should be said.) The question of theodicy has never been answered more persuasively than by the voice out of the whirlwind, because no answer at all is the only answer that makes any sense. This God who stresses the vastness and intricacy of his creation before his suffering creature is, says Herbert Marks, the force of poetry itself: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right, and Emmalea Russo, Confetti
I am old-fashioned and think the internet should emerge from books and return to books. I read Dan’s book because I went on his podcast Eminent Americans to talk about politics and writing outside academia (I’ll let you know when the episode comes out), and I read Emmalea’s because I hosted her on my Substack for a conversation I called “Cosmic Poetics” about cancellation, poetry, Dante, Tarot, astrology, alchemy, and more. (Hence, now that I’ve spoken to them, the appearance of their first names, whereas “the author,” dead and impersonal, is always a last name.) It’s hard to imagine two more different books than these, but I recommend them both: the one a sequence of lucid and compassionate psychobiographical essays on apostates from the political left (Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens), the other a sequence of experimental poems about the alchemy of cinema and the transmutation of matter to spirit and back again. The aforementioned Simone Weil appears in Confetti but not Exit Right, though in another world she might have been the one figure shared in common between the two books—except that her traversal, wholly confounding the political so-called spectrum, was between not right and left but rather, as she said, between “light and gravity.” Now I want to read two additional books: a sequence of lucid and compassionate psychobiographical essays about alchemists and a sequence of experimental poems on apostates from the political left (actually the latter might be fun to write, never mind read). “Matter is our judge,” we read in Confetti. Most of those exiting right (save Hitchens and perhaps Burnham) hoped not. As for me, I judged it apt to consult matter—these two books qua books: paper and glue—before communing with their authors across the spirit realm of the digital, and I’m glad I did.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, and Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
I was also inspired by the transactions of online and IRL to read Fitzgerald’s last completed novel—in this case, by the Art of Darkness podcast’s live episode on Fitzgerald early this month (please see my violent and hopeful memoir of this event). I realized that, like many, I’d reduced Fitzgerald to Gatsby. Tender Is the Night is a very different novel from its illustrious precursor: comprehensive, discursive, and bittersweet rather than concise, dramatized, and tragic. It charts across Europe the doomed marriage of an ambitious psychiatrist from the American provinces and his glamorous and wealthy patient-wife—and charts, too, the moral decline of the doctor, inexorably corrupted by the riches and glamor he married into. Fitzgerald worked on the book for a decade; accordingly, I found it diffuse and strangely organized—poor Scott might have been a one-book man after all—if undeniably poignant and jeweled with lyricism and bitterness, a weighty sense of time’s passage earning the novel the Keatsian elegy its title summons.

Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.

“Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers.”

Hemingway said, “A strange thing is that in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better.” His posthumously published The Garden of Eden is his own version of Fitzgerald’s story. Here a successful American novelist and his new wife on their European honeymoon begin, at her behest, to experiment with gender-bending, race-play, and polyamory, until the wife—who says she wants to be “the darkest white woman in the world” and says too that she’s sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl—threatens to destroy the writer’s work and his writerly vocation. The novel oddly feels less unfinished than Fitzgerald’s; I hesitate to say it’s inferior even to The Sun Also Rises. Its narrative arc is finally conservative—the novel may be read as a warning against sexual experimentation lest one find oneself expelled from the eponymous garden—but we have barely caught up to the erotic modernity it depicts. Toni Morrison presented it as an exhibit in her racial reading of the canon in her Playing in the Dark—she analyzes it as a critical comment on white fantasies of alluring “Africanist” transgression—and it’s now furnished as evidence for Hemingway’s trans rehabilitation. When the Hemingwayesque hero gruffly tells his spouse and their mutual hairdresser he’s “not in the syndicate” even though he’s getting his hair styled identically to his boy-wife’s—we may gloss the “syndicate” as (to use modern parlance) “girls and gays and theys”—readers may wonder, with him, how he got there in the first place. And his struggle to write a novel about his boyhood in Africa on the hunt with his brutal father—about his identification with the targeted elephant mourning its dead fellow and not with the great white hunter determined to bring it down—is as poignant as anything I’ve read in Hemingway’s wounded corpus. Morrison understandably censures this as a white man’s exploitative fantasy of Edenic Africa; she misses, if I may, the boy’s—and the man’s—grief over a violence more pervasive than political geography alone can capture.

Cover image, The Garden of Eden (1986)