Read All the Books I Own

These essays are essentially book reviews dressed up for book publication but some of the writing is really interesting. The first essay, Roaming the Greenwood, is a review of Gregory Woods’ A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (which I have read), and it’s fascinating. There are essays on many others; the most interesting for me were ones on the painter Francis Bacon, Roger Casement, Thomas Mann, and James Baldwin. And Oscar Wilde, because no matter how many times I read his life story, even in short form, I find it completely addictive.

Really enjoyed this. By the author of a biography of French poet Arthur Rimbaud which I found a little elusive at times, particularly when he was discussing Rimbaud’s verse, which can be quite elusive itself. Robb’s thesis here is that it was easier to be gay in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. After the trial of Oscar Wilde, society became much more repressive towards gay people. As public knowledge of homosexuality increased, so did repressive measures towards expressions of it, although things have obviously changed enormously in the last 25 years. Robb’s argument is somewhat counter-intuitive (and he enjoys rocking the boat) because most of us believe that the nineteenth century was a far more repressive time than the twentieth. I don’t think Robb completely makes his case but he certainly comes up with some fascinating examples. Especially interesting are the mostly forgotten novels (and poems) that he has dug up from the period with homosexual themes, either explicit or veiled. This alone provides a glimpse into a hidden world that one would have otherwise argued was unlikely to have existed, if only because so much that would have documented gay life of the time (diaries and letters) was burned to avoid scandal.

See entry on The Magus. I read this because I was interested in Fowles and his thought after reading and being disturbed by the novel. A fascinating glimpse into his mind. Most of the book is concerned with how mankind can attain the Aristos, the ‘best for a given situation’, the good. It is written as a series of aphorisms. It concludes with text by Heraclitus (c. 535-475 B.C.), who is the Greek philosopher upon whose ideas Fowles bases much of his argument in the book. Certainly thought provoking.

Got this for my birthday as a kind of humorous counterpart to a book on John Gielgud and had to consume it right away, all in one sitting. So full of every cliche you would expect from a theatre autobiography, right down to the dramatic cover shot with the author in a long black dress and a finger on her cheek looking down at us, that at first I thought it was a spoof of this kind of thing. But it is not. Here’s a sample (I leave the names out so as not to further slander the individuals concerned): ‘X wears these little wire spectacles and is too servile towards Hamlet … A friend of mine said, “He looks like Hamlet’s accountant.” Y does the Player King quite well, but he could be and should be so much better. I don’t believe he has any idea what he lacks.’ And on in this vein for 202 pages. But I ate it all up. I love this stuff. And came to care for her, her battles with booze and loneliness and mortality. Written in diary form and full of characters from Canadian theatre circa 1977-1990.

I bought this at the same time as Dark Back of Time; they looked sort of the same: dead writers (Upton Sinclair in this, a bunch of them in the other), an unusual form. But I wasn’t as crazy about this as about Dark Back of Time. Marías is more serious and achieves more resonance in his book. U.S. stands for Upton Sinclair (and the United States) and Bachelder’s book is in part an examination of the state of leftist politics in the U.S. now. It’s set in an imagined world where Upton Sinclair re-appears after his natural death, and is murdered repeatedly by his ideological enemies, only to rise again each time; a world where his assassins end up celebrities. He keeps on writing hundreds and hundreds of books which Bachelder describes as dreadful and polemical. He is humourless and driven. He is unkind to his son, who is a character named The Last Folksinger and has appeared in Bachelder’s previous writing. The first section of the book is a collage of material providing snapshots of Sinclair’s story: book reviews, letters, phone logs, etc. The last section is a long satirical and finally moving story about the convergence of Sinclair and a long list of his would be assassins at a book burning event which Sinclair has been fooled into thinking is a testimonial. I enjoyed this last section the most because I felt that Bachelder started to make me care about Sinclair and his story. Otherwise, the book is kind of a one-joke routine: Sinclair gets killed over and over again. We don’t get to know him or to particularly root for him. The author’s (perhaps deliberately) ambivalent stance toward his protagonist made the book somewhat confusing for me too. Is Sinclair a lousy artist and a fool or is he someone to be admired for the courage of his convictions? Or both? Bachelder is a good writer and this book is very clever. But clever is clever. It doesn’t necessarily pull you in.

About Upton Sinclair: ‘Upton Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was a prolific American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres and was widely considered to be one of the best investigators advocating socialist views and supporting anarchist causes. He achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the 20th century. He gained particular fame for his 1906 novel The Jungle, which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a public uproar that partly contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.’ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair)

What a fantastic, extraordinary writer and book. I found it in a bargain bin. Marías is the author of ten novels including All Soul’s, which the present book deals with extensively. This is in some sense not a work of fiction, concerned as it is primarily with the lives of ‘real’ people (the author’s friends and colleagues), especially forgotten real people (the writers John Gawsworth, Wilfrid Ewart, M.P. Shiels; the author’s dead brother Julianín). It is a meditation on time, on the nature of reality as manifested in time, on fiction and reality and their interpenetration, on death, on meaning or the lack of it in human existence, on our habit of writing our lives as stories with sequential significance, to combat randomness. Marías writes in these long, elegant, looping sentences, which I presume are as beautiful in the original Spanish as they are in Esther Allen’s very readable translation. I am sure that there is a great deal of fiction in the book, though; I don’t think a writer like Marías could create a documentary book, and I suspect much of the ‘fiction’ lies in his portrayal of the narrator, who is ostensibly himself, but who he reminds us more than once is a second person, not him. And this narrator is at pains to assert things over and over again: how the stories in the book came to him, how he didn’t seek them out, how he is lazy; the repetitions started to make me aware that maybe Marías was doing this on purpose, to call attention to the fact that he protests too much. One of the impetuses for the book was what happened to him after the publication of his novel All Soul’s, which is set at Oxford University. Marías had taught there and everyone assumed the characters in the book were based on real people in the community, which Marías is at pains to dispute (protesting too much again?). This leads to extended meditations on the relationship between truth and fiction, how the fictions that others ascribed to his book (the inferred relationships between real people and characters in his book, relationships which Marías had not intended at all, and which fascinated him) became reality in more than one instance, how he started to feel a sense of slippage between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’. It’s a very hard book to describe; there is no plot as such, at least not one that moves from beginning to end in an orderly, conventional fashion. But the stories he tells are so fascinating (only the section dealing with the professors at Oxford was less than absorbing for me), and the interrelation between them as the book proceeds unfolds like a good mystery story. One of the stories is about how Marías became the king of a small rocky uninhabited island close to Montserrat called Redonda – an example of how the true stories he tells are utterly fantastical. An absolutely wonderful writer. The kind of book that you will either love or hate. I loved it.

About Javier Marías: ‘Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He is the author of many books of which ten have now been translated into English including: All Souls, A Heart So White (which has sold more than a million copies in its German edition), Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, When I Was Mortal (short stories), The Dark Back Of Time, Written Lives and Your Face Tomorrow: Fever And Spear and Your Face Tomorrow: Dance And Dream. His prizes include the prestigious IMPAC Dublin International Literary award. He is also a prolific translator into Spanish of English authors, including Conrad, Stevenson, Hardy, Sir Thomas Browne, Yeats, Auden and Sterne. He lives in Madrid.’ (www.johnsandoe.com/profile_Marias,_Javi.htm)

Got interested in this book because of an article in the October 2007 issue of Mother Jones by Gary Greenberg, arguing that the use of a biological basis for homosexuality as a defense of its existence may be on shakier ground than previously assumed. It’s a very strange article, seemingly unbiased, but relying on the ex-gay, reparative therapy model as evidence that people can change sexual orientation, as well as scientific evidence that suggests sexual identity is more fluid than commonly believed. None of this is new, though: Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), with its sliding scale from hetero to homosexuality, was based on this very idea. And many younger people seem to be comfortable defining themselves as bisexual rather than straight or gay. Greenberg says, ’... The political consensus that has emerged over the last century and a half [is] that sexual orientation is inborn and immutable, that efforts to change it are bound to fail, and that discrimination against gay people is therefore unjust. But as crucial as this consensus has been to the struggle for gay rights, it may not be as sound as some might wish. While scientists have found intriguing biological differences between gay and straight people, the evidence so far stops well short of proving that we are born with a sexual orientation that we will have for life. Even more important, some research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than we have come to think, that people, especially women, can and do move across customary sexual orientation boundaries, that there are ex-straights as well as ex-gays. Much of this research has stayed below the radar of the culture warriors, but reparative therapists are hoping to use it to enter the scientific mainstream and advocate for what they call the right to self-determination in matters of sexual orientation.’ Not sure why Mother Jones published this. It’s a mixture of sense and nonsense. Reparative therapy has been discredited in North America for years. No one denies that human sexuality is fluid: people change over time, almost all gay people are ex-straights, if you wish to call them that, and there may very well be people who are ex-gays, but for the most part the ex-gay movement as exemplified by the religious right has been a spectacular failure, with its leaders being exposed having gay sex while preaching that they have been cured. I don’t think it’s likely that science is going to discover some marker for gayness in our genetic makeup. I have no idea if gayness is primarily a matter of biology or culture, nature or nurture. But I do know that many people feel profoundly that their orientation is exclusively gay and I don’t see why they can’t claim that that is a fact about them in the same manner as skin colour. Greenberger would have it that it is something more like religion, something we choose, and that we need to find another basis than a biological/scientific one to defend homosexuality. That may prove to be true, but until science proves unequivocally that there is or is not a biological basis for gayness and until there are more credible examples of gay people changing their orientation to straight than the ones offered by the religious ex-gay movement, I think we can safely continue to describe homosexuality as an inborn trait, for at least some of the population.

Bayer’s book is a fascinating account of the changes in thinking about homosexuality, from viewing it as a crime and sin to thinking of it as a illness, a process which has been described as its medicalization. After a brief survey of historical attitudes, he traces medical opinion from Freud, who had a humane approach though he thought of homosexuality as an arrestment of the development process; through Sandor Rado, who suggested homosexuality could be reversed (his disciple Charles Socarides, who died recently, was vehemently anti-homosexual); to Alfred Kinsey, who was the first to document the incidence of homosexuality in the lives of American men and to surprise everyone by positing a much higher occurence of gay sex than most believed; Evelyn Hooker, who was the first scientist to reject the orthodoxy that homosexuality was a sickness; Thomas Szasz, who went further and rejected the whole psychiatric enterprise; and, finally, to Judd Marmor, one of the first American psychiatrists to publicly challenge his profession’s assumption that homosexuality was an illness. Then Bayer traces the gay activism, from the relatively quiescent Mattachine Society to the confrontational Gay Liberation Front, which led to the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM) in 1973, a decision that by no means reflected the views of all of the members of the organization and one that is still criticized as being motivated more by political considerations (the increasing pressure from gay activist groups) than by scientific evidence. It is a fascinating, complicated story.

One interesting sidenote is that Greenberg reports that Robert Spitzer, one of the psychiatrists instrumental in the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM (in spite of his initial misgivings) conducted a study reported in Archives of Sexual Behaviour in 2003 which ‘concluded that gay people could indeed change their sexual orientation’ and that Spitzer ‘also called for an end to the ban on research into reparative therapy …’ Stranger and stranger. God knows what happened to Spitzer since 1973. The other interesting thing to note is that if you google the title of Bayer’s book, the lunatic fundamentalist website www.traditionalvalues.org is the 3rd choice you are offered, well before many sites that simply provide info about the book. To me, that is disheartening and sad.

Of Ronald Bayer: ‘Ronald Bayer, Ph.D., is Professor at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he has taught for 14 years. He has taken a leadership role in the HIV Center’s work on ethics since the Center’s beginnings and is now Co-Director of the Ethics, Policy, and Human Rights Core. Prior to coming to Columbia, he was at the Hastings Center, a research institute devoted to the study of ethical issues in medicine and the life sciences.

Dr. Bayer’s research has examined ethical and policy issues in public health, with a special focus on AIDS, tuberculosis, illicit drugs, and tobacco. His broader goal is to develop an ethics of public health. He is an elected member of the IOM [Institute of Medicine], serves on its Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, and has served on IOM committees dealing with the social impact of AIDS, tuberculosis elimination, vaccine safety, smallpox vaccination, and the Ryan White Care Act. His articles on AIDS have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, the American Journal of Public Health, and The Milbank Quarterly. His books include Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (1981), Private Acts, Social Consequences: AIDS and the Politics of Public Health (1989); AIDS in the Industrialized Democracies: Passions, Politics and Policies (1991, edited with David Kirp); Confronting Drug Policy: Illicit Drugs in a Free Society (1993, edited with Gerald Oppenheimer); and Blood Feuds: Blood, AIDS and the Politics of Medical Disaster (1999, edited with Eric Feldman); AIDS Doctors: Voices from the Epidemic, (2000, written with Gerald Oppenheimer and Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS (2003, written with Robert Klitzman) and Unfiltered: Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health (2004 Harvard University Press) (edited with Eric Feldman).’ (www.hivcenternyc.org)

Storr’s thesis is that we have come to believe that the only way to achieve real fulfillment is through interpersonal relationships, and that this is not the whole truth. He looks at the lives of creative individuals who have found most of the meaning in their lives through the solitary pursuit of their craft: composers, writers, philosophers such as Beethoven, Anthony Trollope, Wittgenstein, etc. He also talks about how creative endeavour has been demonstrated to be a buffer against depression and notes the higher incidence of depression among artists than among the general population. He looks at the reasons some individuals are predisposed to being alone: loss of a parent at a young age or rearing by parents who are unloving, but also posits that some people are just born with less of a need to be close to others. Storr’s goal is to rehabilitate the notion of solitude so that those who prefer it are not seen as antisocial failures but, rather, motivated, creative individuals whose work makes necessary a greater degree of aloneness and who derive a great deal of happiness from their work. I am almost convinced by his thesis except for the fact that there is such a high incidence of depressive illness among artists, compared to the general population. This is not to say that all artists are depressive; many are not. But to wish such a life on any individual simply so that we may experience great works of art seems to me to be a very selfish proposition on our parts. Although Storr notes that some artists who marry late in life gain happiness and intimacy also lose their creative drive, it would seem to me that, with the advent of more sophisticated antidepressants and a better understanding of the illness, creative individuals who are also depressive could lead somewhat less bleak, reclusive lives and still be artistically fulfilled. I’m not sure Storr would have agreed. But I think he has performed a useful service in attempting to remove stigma from those individuals who choose to live their lives alone.

Of Anthony Storr: ‘Born in London, Storr was a solitary, friendless child plagued by frequent illness, including severe asthma and septicaemia, from which he nearly died. He was the youngest of four children, separated by 10 years from his closest sibling. His father, Vernon Faithfull Storr, Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey, was 51 when Anthony was born and his mother, Katherine Cecilia Storr, was 44, from whom he seemed to have inherited a tendency to occasional episodes of depression. Virtually an only child, Storr was affected by the trauma, shared by most boys of his class and time, of being sent away to a boarding prep school at the age of 8. There, and later at Winchester College, he was bitterly unhappy. Extremely slow to make friends, and showing little proficiency for games, he was bullied and made only average academic progress … The sense of being a loner never left him, and was to affect the course of his career, as well as the content of his books. What preserved his sanity and emotional equilibrium was a growing passion for music … He always maintained that he would much rather have been a professional musician than a psychiatrist or writer, had he been blessed with the necessary talent and training; he freely acknowledged that his friendship with artists of the calibre of Alfred Brendel, and the musicologist Hans Keller, meant far more than would have equivalent friendships with Freud, Jung or Adler. Storr’s decision to become a psychiatrist was made soon after he went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1939. His moral tutor was C.P. Snow, who became a lifelong friend. “I owed him a tremendous debt”, Storr told me. “He was the first person who made me feel I might be any good at anything … When I told Snow tentatively that I might go into psychiatry, he said, ‘I think you’d be very good at it”’ … Developing an interest in analytical psychotherapy, [he] went into analysis with Jung’s English friend and colleague, Dr E. A. Bennet, and later became a member of the (Jungian) Society for Analytical Psychology … Storr’s reputation as a writer and broadcaster began with publication of his first book, The Integrity of the Personality, in 1960. He was 40, and, up to that point, had not thought of himself as a writer. “I just felt the need to explain to myself what the hell I thought I was doing”, he said … During the following years he published 11 other books … His understanding of human psychopathology gave him a rich appreciation of the creative possibilities inherent in mental suffering, and the powerful potential for self-healing to be found in artistic and intellectual creativity. This made him impatient with the medical model for psychiatry and its obsession with its symptomatic classification. “I want to show”, he wrote, “that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place. The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.” He died on 17 March 2001, aged 80 … ’ (Anthony Stevens, pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/25/9/365)

Published in Canada’s Centennial Year. A short little book, a transcript of six talks Canadian poet Louis Dudek gave on CBC Radio in 1966. He traces the idea of a subjective personal narrator from prior to its existence (religious literature, where the ‘I’ is God; Greek literature, where a collective group identity prevails) through its first appearances in Latin literatue (Catullus, Sappho) to the Renaissance (Montaigne), which is commonly held to be the era in which the individual perspective makes its first appearance. He moves on to Rousseau, who ‘put the first person at the centre of things’; Byron, ‘the first example of a poet who created a fiction and then was trapped for a time into the folly of imitating himself’; Whitman, in whose mystic identification of the self with the cosmos ‘the opposition between the self and the not-self, the subjective or particular and the universal reality, is abolished’; Proust, in whose writing the past invades the present (the madeleine), leaving us ‘released from the entangled present, open to a reality beyond time … timelessness and the release it offers is a return … from the cul-de-sac of subjectivity … to universality’; to realists such as Flaubert and T.S. Eliot (and Joyce, according to Dudek) and the cult of impersonality in art, which turns out to be a big sham, and I agree with Dudek here, Eliot’s poetry is intensely personal – it was others who turned it into a diagnosis of the malaise of the age – but Eliot takes great pains to hide that fact as much as possible (he took legal action against the critic John Peter when Essays in Criticism published an essay of Peter’s in which he claimed to trace Eliot’s homoerotic feelings for his friend Jean Verdenal in The Waste Land – all copies of this issue of the magazine were destroyed); and finishes with 20th century poets ‘of the particulars’ like Pound and William Carlos Williams (both of whom he knew) and Robert Creeley, with a nod to Canadian poets like Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, Miriam Waddington, and other of Dudek’s contemporaries. The main theme in the book is this constant tension in literature between the universal (stories of gods, stories that attempt to be objective, omniscient) and the particular or personal. Dudek claims that these two poles of literature are always struggling with each other and that this struggle saves writing from the sterility of complete impersonality or the solipsism of complete subjectivity. I enjoyed this book: Dudek is warm, self-deprecating, unpretentious and very clear, and he is passionate and revealing about the writers he chooses to focus on. Reading short books really makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something.

Of Louis Dudek: ‘Louis Dudek was born in Montreal on February 6th, 1918 in a Catholic family emigrated from Poland. Reading books was his favourite pastime in his childhood years … especially Keats´ and Shelley´s verse. In 1936 he entered McGill University in Montreal … Upon his graduation he worked as a freelance journalist for the Montrealer and other papers. During these years he was closely involved with First Statement, the literary magazine founded by John Sutherland. Together with Sutherland and Irving Layton, he fought hard to foster a native tradition in poetry and establish new ways of writing in Canada, pioneering a direct style that articulated experience in plain language … Dudek found in the United States a new style that offered him an alternative both to the British influence and to a ‘provincial’ national writing. He read American poets such us Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and Edgar Lee Masters … On September 16, 1941 he married Stephanie Zuperko and they both moved to New York. There he joined Columbia University as a postgraduate student in history and journalism, but he soon changed his major from history to literature. During these years, he kept in close contact with the Canadian literary scene and published articles and poems in First Statement. In 1944 some of his poems were published in Unit of Five, which also contained poems by P. K. Page, Ronald Hambleton, Raymond Souster and James Wreford. Two years later the Ryerson Press issued East of the City, his first separate collection of poems. In 1947 he met William Carlos Williams in a reading given by the poet-doctor on 25th October in New York … Dudek started to correspond with [Ezra] Pound in 1949 and he met him in person in 1950 … It was Pound who encouraged Dudek to forget about nationalism and adopt a cosmopolitan style of writing. ... In 1951 he joined McGill University where he lectured in modern poetry. He spent most of his life in this city and was a professor emeritus at McGill at the time of his death in 2001. Dudek was determined to create a school of modernism in Canadian poetry. Together with Raymond Souster and Irving Layton, he founded Contact Press, which published Cerberus (poems by Dudek, Layton and Souster), Twenty Four Poems (Dudek), Love the Conqueror Worm (Layton), The Transparent Sea (Dudek), as well as early work by George Bowering, Al Purdy, Milton Acorn and Margaret Atwood, among other important Canadian writers. The Contact Press Poetry Readings (1957-62), held in Toronto, also brought American poets such us Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley. In 1956 he embarked in another publishing venture, the McGill Poetry Series, which edited Leonard Cohen´s Let Us Compare Mythologies, and in 1956 he founded Delta, a personal literary magazine that favored experimental poetry … ’ Antonio Ruiz, Sept. 10, 2001 (www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/dudek/bio.htm) A complete list of Dudek’s books is available at this web address.

Man, she is smart. But Northrop Frye’s jokes are funnier.