The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy
The friendship of the two writers began in their early teens and continued until Percy’s death in 1990, at age seventy-four. Their correspondence would seem to offer interesting reading, but several aspects make this book unsatisfying. One is that Foote didn’t save Percy’s letters until 1970, so from 1948 til then we get only Foote’s letters. The editor, Jay Tolson, entitles this first section “Master to Apprentice.” Foote took the role of master because, though the men were the same age, Foote began writing fiction first. By nature he was a pontificator, and he doled out advice on writing and espoused the nobility of the profession. He went on at length about his work (plot outlines, etc.). He also gave urgent suggestions as to what Percy should read (the names of Proust, Dante, and Dostoevsky must appear well over a hundred times). He comes across as a didactic dispenser of knowledge. When we finally get responses from Percy (his first letter appears on page 128, close to the midpoint of the book) it becomes clear that he wasn’t a compliant pupil. And it’s interesting that he turned to Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate for help with his first novel. Foote was adamantly against this: “. . . they are to be avoided as you would avoid something contagious.” I think Percy liked Foote, but took him with a grain of salt – he may even, like me, skimmed much of what Foote wrote him (and, also like me, never got around to reading Proust). Even when both men’s letters are included, they’re spotty – a half year will go by without any correspondence. Percy’s letters are better – short and often humorous. As for insight into the personalities and lives of the two men, there’s some of that, but not a whole lot. I think Tolson did a shoddy job with his footnotes. He’ll give us a street address, but he leaves us in the dark about matters that are important (who is this person being discussed, using only his first name?). Still, a long relationship like this generates some feeling. Which makes the ending of the book both odd and sad. Tolson includes the very short eulogy Foote gave at Percy’s funeral. In it Foote throws in the following names: Dostoevsky, Proust, Faulkner, Schopenhauer, Maupassant, James, Dante. But not one personal word about his old friend.

Four Short Novels by D. H. Lawrence
I’ve admired some of Lawrence’s short stories – “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Rocking Horse Winner,” “Tickets, Please.” But his novels are another matter. Though I liked the first third of Sons and Lovers, in which he examines his parent’s marriage, it falters badly when he turns his attention to himself. I couldn’t stick for long with The Rainbow and Women in Love. He loses me when he beleaguers some abstract point about life or explores inexpressible states of being. I feel the characters and the plots are being stifled by an agenda. The short form almost forces him to be succinct and grounded. I took up this volume in the hope that the “short” aspect would prevail. This was true in Love Among the Haystacks (the briefest of the four), in which two brothers find women that they will marry. It was simple and generous, and it left me feeling satisfied. The other three novellas – The Ladybird, The Fox and The Captain’s Doll – were all about male/female relationships, and all had an enigmatic quality that initially interested me. But my interest turned into incredulity. If people act strangely, the reader must still believe in them. But the obscure and shifting emotions of these characters not only became unbelievable, but ridiculous. The feeling I had could be summed up with “Who are these people and what’s their problem?” I don’t think Lawrence had a clear idea. I quit The Ladybird halfway through, but finished the others to their inconclusive endings (with The Captain’s Doll it was a struggle through twenty pages of descriptive prose). Someone should have made Lawrence recognise his strengths and weaknesses. Ambition – which, for him, took the form of conveying Deep Ideas – was a killer for him as a writer of fiction.

Flesh Is Heir - Lincoln Kirstein
In the first chapter, “Flesh is Fear,” Roger Baum is fourteen, attending a boys’ boarding school. Initially he’s on friendly terms with a new arrival – Andrew Stone – but soon Andrew embarks on a campaign of psychological warfare against him. Roger is susceptible to Andrew’s tactics because he’s imaginative; he comes to feel as if he were being “extinguished in the pityless blackness of an influence that fitted him like a strait-jacket.” Andrew is creepy and his actions incomprehensible; but Roger is the subject of the chapter, and his fear is convincing. Also of merit is the atmosphere of a boys’ school, with its rivalries and jealousies and cruelty. The boys were real boys, the writing was direct and forceful, the narrative lean and unencumbered. I found this opening to be highly promising. But the second chapter, “Flesh is Work,” was just okay, and in the next five a steady decline takes place. They have Roger growing into his early twenties, drifting in and out of posh surroundings in Europe and America, interacting with various characters, none of whom made an impression on me. The emotional impact conveyed in the opening is never duplicated in any form. The falloff can be explained by the fact that the author was twenty-five when he wrote Flesh Is Heir. Only in his encounter with Andrew Stone had he attained the distance to make convincing fiction. For the rest of the book what we get is pretentious posturing. In an Afterword, written when he was sixty-five, Kirstein seems bewildered that the Lost American Fiction series had chosen to reprint the book. He notes its faults and states that he had second thoughts after its acceptance for publication and was relieved when it was totally ignored by critics and readers. He never continued as a novelist; his primary fame came as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. Maybe his longtime prominence in Big Apple artistic and intellectual circles made him a candidate to be “rediscovered.” But a more deserving – and appreciative – choice could have been made. As a writer of fiction Kirstein should get credit for writing one very good long story. And that’s it.

Laughable Loves – Milan Kundera (Czech)
Kundera’s characters and the situations he puts them in are a means by which he can explore ideas about human nature. Sex plays a prominent role in these seven stories, but this isn’t a sensuous book; sex is treated clinically and is most often a means by which people wield power over one another. As for the title of the collection, love is nowhere to be found, and the laughter is often contemptuous. Kundera’s thoroughness in pursuing emotional maneuvering can become laborious, and the sex distasteful (“Symposium” made me yearn for simplicity and virtue). Kundera is at his cruelest in “Dr. Havel After Ten Years.” He presents us with a man who is “legendary” as a womanizer; but, while staying at a spa, Havel finds that anonymity and age have negated his power to get any woman he snaps his fingers at. His ego is somewhat revived when an editor recognizes him as the famous libertine; to this naive young man the doctor imparts sage advice about sensuality. I found the premise to be foolish and juvenile – until I realized that I was reading a farce about shallowness. When the young man introduces his girlfriend to the doctor (who’s in a foul mood at the time) Havel dismisses her: “Yes, that girl is really nice, but a dog, a canary, or a duckling waddling about in a farmyard can also be nice.” He then maliciously promotes his secretary – an unattractive older woman – as someone who (to an epicure in these matters) possesses a “genuine erotic beauty.” So the editor dumps his girlfriend and has sex with the secretary. The story makes a point about how people are swayed by appearances and reputation and celebrity. When Havel’s beautiful actress wife visits him for a day, he shows her off, making sure that the women who rejected his advances will see how she adores him. After the wife leaves these women are all too eager to get in bed with Havel, and, of course, he accommodates them. In other stories Kundera is softer, more realistic and even, in “Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead,” a bit compassionate. Not much – just a bit.

The Lost Girl – D. H. Lawrence
I found this little-known work by Lawrence to be more engaging than his message-laden major novels. In The Lost Girl he’s lost. The plot lurches about, and his main character can’t feel one way without having a contradictory response. But when you accept Alvina as a person unable to find her way in life, you accept the confusion. Her need to belong – to be a part of something or somebody but failing again and again to achieve this – mattered to me. As she turns thirty, still a virgin, she becomes reckless (though she always had a reckless streak that she let loose in small ways). She joins a traveling music troupe (she plays the piano as actors put on a show). Ciccio, one of the troupe members, overwhelms her both physically and emotionally; she finds him beautiful and compelling. Yet some inner core in her resists him, and she often sees him as no more than a stupid animal. To me Ciccio was the weakest character in the book; by making him uncommunicative Lawrence also makes him unbelievable. Alvina continues to separate herself from her privileged upbringing by marrying Ciccio and moving to a remote and primitive village in Italy (which both enchants and repels her). At the end she’s pregnant and Ciccio is about to leave to serve in the Italian army (WWI has broken out). Lawrence has created a muddle, and the abrupt and simplistic hopeful ending he comes up with is a cop out. But, still . . . What matters in this odd, over-the-top and somewhat preposterous book is Lawrence’s exuberance: he feels his power to write, and this was infectious. Throughout are descriptions of people and places that are brilliant. Alvina is tumultuously alive, as are many others in the large cast: her wayward father, whose dissolution we follow; the imperious Madame who rules over the troupe; the prancing Mr. May. Ciccio’s brother is a third tier character, but Lawrence captures his essence in a few sentences: “There would sometimes be a strange passivity on his worn face, an impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tom-cat.”

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin
I like quiet characters and a simple prose style, so I wanted to like this book, and for a good stretch I did. First we’re with Eilis in Ireland just after WWII; though she’s fairly content with her life, she leaves home when she gets a chance to better her situation in America. She lives in a boarding house and works as a salesgirl at a department store; she takes night classes in bookkeeping at Brooklyn College. All was okay so far, though there was no discernible direction forming out of the scattered events. We get a Jewish professor Eilis seems interested in, and her lady boss makes unwanted lesbian advances, but neither of these characters turn out to play any role. Gradually I began to be bothered by Eilis’s emotional tepidness. I expected her to show some spirit when a love interest arrives, but Tony is a bland, middle-of-the-road Nice Guy and her response to him is flat. At this point, halfway through the book, my reading became as plodding and dutiful as Toibin’s writing. When Eilis’s sister dies it seemed like a weak contrivance to advance a stagnant plot. Before she returns to Ireland for the funeral Eilis loses her virginity to Tony (an excruciating scene) and the two secretly marry. Back home she gets interested in Jim; she decides that Tony’s Nice Guy love is just a burden. She wants to stay in Ireland, but she’s forced (by way of another contrivance) to go back to Brooklyn and give up Jim. I could care less. Tony, Jim, Tom, Dick, Harry – none of them matter. Quiet characters interest me only when they reveal their depth, and depth is what Eilis lacks. This is a shallow book posing as a deep book, and therefore it’s a phoney book. Yet – and here we come to a few side issues that contributed to my resentment – the Scribner paperback is saturated with forty-two (42!) blurbs. Have Scribner and Toibin no shame, and has the literary world lost all discrimination? But there’s more. After the end of Brooklyn there’s a sixteen page preview of Toibin’s upcoming novel, Nora Webster. So they’ve finally found a way to insert a crummy commercial in a book that you can hold in your hands.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The main problem with this post-apocalyptic novel is that it’s monotonous. Regarding the action and the feelings of the two characters, what happens on page one is happening (with little variation) on page seventeen, and on page 84, and on page 116 – which is when I suddenly found myself flipping through the remainder of the book. In his depiction of love between a father and son, McCarthy spreads it on too thick; he’s in his true element with menace and cruelty. But since I’m not a fan of horror flicks, I couldn’t appreciate the atrocities committed by the cannibalistic monsters he has roaming the land. Nor was his style of writing to my liking; I’ll close with three examples. The opening sentences: “When he awoke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some glaucoma dimming the world.”  From page 31: “He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun was returning at last. The snow orange and quivering.” And here’s a conversation between father and son (each person’s words occupy their own little paragraph): “Is it cold?” “Yes. It’s freezing.” “Do you want to go in?” “I don't know.” “Sure you do.” “Is it okay?” “Come on.” As was the case with Hemingway, McCarthy calls attention to his prose under the guise of simplicity, and I find this annoying and false. 

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

Reading Lawrence’s short stories – notably, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” – made me aware of how good he could be. So I returned to a book that I had abandoned many years ago; I thought that this time around I’d be more sympathetic and patient – and I was. I also found that my preconceptions (garnered from commentary I had read) were baseless. In the first third of this autobiographical novel Lawrence examines the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. To place all the blame on Walter Morel doesn’t do justice to Lawrence’s insight; the Morels were a tragically mismatched couple. But the major misinterpretation is the characterization of Mrs. Morel as a suffocating mother. Though she does look to her children as her reason for being, believing that in their lives hers would find purpose, she isn’t selfish; she wants her sons and daughter to be happy and fulfilled. As for Paul (who is Lawrence), she has no desire to possess him; her hope is that he’ll find a woman who will be good for him. That the two women he’s attracted to are not right for him isn’t something she dreams up; it’s a fact that he’s aware of. His devotion to his mother is not coerced; he gives it of his own free will. The novel weakens considerably in the last third, when Paul is an adult. The intense scrutiny Lawrence devotes to him turns into emotional nitpicking. A law should be passed decreeing that nobody under the age of thirty-five can write anything autobiographical. They don’t have enough separation from their youth to see that what they went through wasn’t that momentous. Lawrence compounds the problem by presuming to enter the minds of the women Paul is involved with, so we not only get too much of conflicted Paul, but the conflicts of others too. It’s convoluted and ponderous; the prose (which in the first part has an unadorned beauty) gets overripe with abstract ideas that must be conveyed. To put it simply, Lawrence thought too much. When he detached himself from himself and didn’t attempt to express inexpressible states of being he could write with an immediacy and power that few authors have been gifted with.

First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese)

The inconclusiveness of these stories (or at least the five I read) left me asking “What was that about?” and “Why did the author bother to write this?” Only “Nature” was fairly interesting, but it too wanders about in search of a narrative. It’s as if Kawabata lays out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for the reader; though each piece has a discernible image, they don’t fit together to create an entire picture; not even a clearly defined character or emotion emerges. The author’s preoccupation with sex (wife swapping, gender change, etc.) puts him in step with modern Western sensibilities. As does his dialogue (“Yeah, your nerves are really worn down. Divorce is a tough thing for anyone to have to go through.”). I wondered if that dialogue, which stands in awkward contrast with the rest of the prose, was an accurate rendering into English of what Kawabata wrote. But it doesn’t matter – these glum, constricted stories have little to offer. I was amused only once, and this came in the Introduction, when the translator thanked Joyce Carol Oates for her help. That woman is everywhere.