Weekly Readings #22 (07/04/22-07/10/22)

the will to change

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

First, at johnpistelli.com, where I write about classic books in all genres, I have an essay on D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. It’s the sequel to The Rainbow, which I read back in May, and often considered Lawrence’s greatest novel, its experimental design—a series of image-laden symbolic set-pieces—his greatest prose contribution to modernism.

The novel’s Nietzschean philosophy lends itself no less to the period, with Lawrence’s fictional surrogate and spokesman, Rupert Birkin, and Rupert’s eventual wife, Ursula from The Rainbow, achieving a union of souls-in-becoming that takes leave of the machine the modern world is becoming. Meanwhile, Ursula’s sister, Gudrun, is less lucky in her own union with the organization man and industrial magnate Gerald Crich, standing in for the fated soullessness of the modern world, who also rebuffs Birkin’s ambiguously homoerotic offer of comradely love, though not before the two men wrestle naked in the drawing room.

Most interesting to me in the novel are the debates about art that occur in the last 100 pages, when our protagonists go to Germany and meet the novel’s villain, a gay and possibly Jewish arriviste aesthete pedophile. Otherwise, I might the classic 1969 film adaptation, written by Larry Kramer and directed by Ken Russell, better. It might be that Glenda Jackson’s face is more fascinating than Lawrence’s sometimes cumbrous prose. In my essay, I write:

If my criticism above implicating Lawrence in the Holocaust was too heavy and moralistic, and it was, I will conclude by suggesting that the novel’s best critics were screenwriter Larry Kramer and director Ken Russell, who adapted Women in Love into a classic film of 1969. The gay and Jewish Kramer and the Catholic Russell revenge themselves on the ultra-Protestant Lawrence’s northern apocalypse by stressing the novel’s painterly pictorialism, often drowned in Lawrence’s prose-poetic prolixity, and the arch wit of its dialogue. Lawrence’s somber Nietzschean homoerotic fascism—as relevant as ever in our epoch of Bronze Age Pervert—melts into a more campy playfulness. Onscreen, the narrative’s sexuality, gay and straight, is unmistakably a matter of bodies in sweltering or shivering contact rather than star-souls in an abstract cosmic collision. And Glenda Jackson’s Oscar-winning turn as Gudrun fills out the character with the knowing sensuality and artistic gift she sometimes lacks in the novel.

Over at my daily blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, I added a footnote to the essay with a bit more elaboration on my admiration for Russell’s film, and then I quoted Camille Paglia’s breathless appreciation of the novel, a major inspiration on her opus Sexual Personae, from her collection Vamps and Tramps:

Lawrence’s caricatures of feminists seem realistic again, since the current [i.e., ’80s/’90s-era] reborn women’s movement similarly veered toward fanaticism, not just among the anti-pornography and anti-beauty ideologues (today’s Carry Nations) but among mainstream activists whose obsession with feminist rhetoric has supplanted all larger philosophical or cultural concerns. I now recognize in the dissatisfied, word-obsessed Gudrun Brangwen the bright, perfect, brittle overcontrolled women careerists of the legal, corporate, and academic worlds who have risen to prominence in the last twenty years and who coolly schedule their delayed pregnancies and professional childcare by the time clock. Their destined mate is Gerald Crich, the ultimate capitalist manager, patron of the body reduced to a machine.

Also at Grand Hotel Abyss, I confessed that, having grown weary of the culture war, I belatedly became addicted to the Once Upon Time…at Bennington College podcast from late last year, Lili Anolik’s seductive narrative of the legendary private school’s equally legendary Gen-X novelists: Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Donna Tartt. This led me to revisit a thought I had about American literary generations a few years ago, in the introductory paragraphs to an essay I wrote on Renata Adler’s Speedboat. I will place the paragraphs here too, in case they spark thought in anybody else:

Almost every member of American literature’s last unambiguously major generation, the giants passing from the scene, was born in the 1930s: Carver (b. 1938), DeLillo (b. 1936), Didion (b. 1934), McCarthy (b. 1933), Morrison (b. 1931), Oates (b. 1938), Pynchon (b. 1937), Roth (b. 1933), Sontag (b. 1933), Updike (b. 1932), Wolfe (b. 1930)—and we can add some that are only a few years off in either direction for good measure, like Le Guin (b. 1929) or Ozick (b. 1928) or Irving (b. 1942). We might even take a cue from the Swedish Academy and adduce Bob Dylan (b. 1941).

This fact should be surprising since the Silent Generation, born from around 1925 to 1945, is so called because it came between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers and seemed to leave less of an obvious historical mark than either. But perhaps its greatest effect was on American letters. I came across an explanation for why this might be so in a 2015 profile of the renascent journalist and novelist Renata Adler (b. 1937):

In an essay from 1970 (“Introduction, Toward A Radical Middle”), Adler argues that her generation “grew up separately, without a rhetoric.” They, the Silent Generation, are small, caught between two Americas: too young to have been involved in World War II or to fully absorb its traumas, but too old to have been wholly included in the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. “In a way, in culture and in politics,” Adler writes, “we are the last custodians of language—because of the books we read, and because history, in our time, has wrung so many changes on the meaning of terms, and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them.”

Precisely the sociological in-betweenness that made this generation less interesting for demographers than stereotyped GIs or hippies also made its members ideal, because somewhat detached, observers of the mid-to-late 20th century.

(By the way, I should admit I take a self-serving interest in this dubious topic of generational analysis because I wonder if those of us born around 1980 might not form a similarly well-positioned cultural cohort. We were also reared on a historical fulcrum: our childhood and adolescent sensibilities were shaped by the print/analog world of the lingering postwar liberal order even as we grew to adulthood after 9/11 and on the Internet. Like the Silent Generation before us, we have a foot on each side of our time’s major socio-historical divides.)

I also considered the irony that one of the major fiction writing professors at Bennington in this period, Nicholas Delbanco, once wrote a nonfiction “study of writers in community” called Group Portrait, about the time around the turn of the last century when Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and H.G. Wells lived in proximity to one another in the English countryside.

Speaking of creativity communities, and elsewhere online, I enjoyed Amanda Fortini’s introduction to Black Mountain College in the New York Times:

Among Black Mountain’s most visionary notions was to put the arts “at the very center of things.” Rice believed that the study of art taught students that the real struggle was, in his words, with one’s “own ignorance and clumsiness.” The idea was not to produce artists per se (“in fact,” as Harper’s rather bitingly put it, “the college regards it as a duty to discourage mere talent from thinking itself genius”) but thinking citizens who, honed by the discipline inherent to the arts, were capable of making complex choices — about their own work and, ultimately, in the larger world. Students were thus encouraged to study music, drama and fine art, and classes in other subjects were scheduled so as not to conflict. “Art was not relegated to the sidelines,” says Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, “It was the basis of all education.”

D. H. Lawrence would have gone for this. The Black Mountain School is honestly a bit of a blank in my cultural education—and some of the avant-gardism it produced (e.g., John Cage) means little to me.

Of its major figures, I know Charles Olson best, and him not very well at all. I read his pioneering 1947 Melville study Call Me Ishmael back when I first read Moby-Dick the summer between high school and college, and then I read it again when I reread Moby-Dick in December of 2016. (Why December of 2016? Because at the beginning of November of 2016, I said to myself, “If Hillary wins, I will spend December reading novels by women. If Trump wins, I will reread Moby-Dick.”) Then I left a somewhat ungenerous one-paragraph review of Call Me Ishmael on Goodreads, which I doubt anyone has ever read and which makes at least a possibly useful historical point, so I paste it in here:

I read this alongside my first reading of Moby-Dick when I was a teenager, and read it again for old times' sake as I re-read the novel recently. Though Olson's pioneering account of what Melville took from Shakespeare remains instructive, I found his book as a whole less remarkable the second time around. Olson writes of Moby-Dick as a kind of unmediated black-magic myth, missing the novel's crucial dimension of Romantic irony and parody; Olson is too in the shadow of Pound and Lawrence, writing in that showily telegraphic modernist style that now seems to me more dated than Victorian fustian. Call Me Ishmael is worth reading, however, for a marker of how a certain aesthetic critique of American society generally held by reactionaries in the early twentieth century (the aforementioned Pound and Lawrence, as well as Eliot, Heidegger, etc.) crossed with Marxism in the midcentury to become political common sense among radicals by the 1960s. Also, the excerpts Olson provides from Melville's Shakespeare marginalia and his journal of his travels in the Middle East are wonderful, though the footnotes in the Norton Critical Moby-Dick leads me to believe that Olson's scholarship, though groundbreaking, has been superseded. In general, I judge this more a historical curio than a living work of criticism.

Olson’s 1949 poem, “The Kingfishers,” has been called the transitional poem between modernism and postmodernism, but for whatever reason it’s been left out of the Norton Anthology so I never taught it when I used to do Contemporary American Literature. I wouldn’t claim to understand it, then, beyond maybe its conclusion, announcing postmodernism’s ethical commitment—or aesthetic commitment in the guise of an ethical commitment—to the oppressed, vanquished, subaltern:

Olson is, if I understand him, moralizing at this point in the poem over Mayan ruins. If you have any doubt that we are in a post-postmodern moment, contrast the Black Mountain poet’s credo with the viral Tweet of the week, desperate for the imprimatur of the western standard it ostensibly opposes:

But this development wouldn’t surprise our poet, given his lyric’s indelible first line: “What does not change / is the will to change.”