Sunday January 04, 2004

BOOK CHAT. Aren't you tired of politics already? I sure as fuck am.

Been reading a bunch of John O'Hara stories. This guy sold a lot mid-century, and it's easy to see why. Alice in Wonderland said, "What's the use of a book without pictures and conversations?" and if O'Hara didn't provide pictures (though his descriptions of settings are often rendered in clinical detail), boy oh boy did he provide conversations. No matter how dim or introverted, his characters fill their quote marks like senators on a filibuster. During one story particularly, "Andrea," about a long-term affair between two chronic unmarriageables, I kept thinking Shut up! Shut up and get to the punch line already! The punch line, alas, is usually dreary and unsatisfying.

Every once in a while, though, he rings a bell. Gore Vidal, who summed him up in 1964, thought O'Hara rang it in "The Trip," which I haven't read. I heard the bell in "Flight," which starts with an old playwright taking a spectacular fall on an icy sidewalk and, before he (unexpectedly) dies from his injury, having a long, pertinent conversation with his ex-actress wife, and an equally pertinent monologue, addresed to his dead son in a dream:

If you lead a completely useless life, but do it with style and die young enough, you're quite likely to be remembered with more affection than the man who has a record of accomplishment. But the secret is to die young enough. If you think you're going to live to a ripe old age, it's better to pile up a record of accomplishment of some sort. It may be bridge-building, or money-making, or butterfly-collecting, but it has to be something. People don't like to see longevity wasted on a do-nothing. And as a rule, it isn't...

Vidal thought O'Hara's writing overly improvisational, without a strong sense of direction. But the most skilled and dogged improvisers do develop a knack for bringing it all back home, as they say.

Also read most of George Gissing's "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," a made-up collection of journal writings by a Grub Street hack who has found leisure to pen some arty occasional pieces in his old age. (Gissing wrote "New Grub Street," the novel that gave him a brief vogue in his own time and also in the late 1990s, based equally, one imagines, on his experiences as, well, a Grub Street hack.) It's mostly pretty dreadful -- the wheezes of a petty bourgeois playing at Thoreau -- but I find it instructive sometimes to read bad writing from a previous era. This one's sort of like "Tuesdays with Morrie" from the turn of the last Century, with treacly amateur naturalism, imbecile social analysis, and breast-clasping swoons over ancient literature ("But I am thinking of the Anabasis. Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to to learn the language in order to read it") that remind me of the insufferable David Denby after he took a course in the Great Books.

Speaking of vintage crap, I've also been leafing through "The Spike," the 1980 novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss about a Woodwardesque reporter who learns that the CIA was right about everything and that the American government is worm-eaten by Soviet moles (reaching as high as the Vice-Presidency) who yearn for a CCCP takeover. This piece of shit follows the Ludlam-Drury playbook, with villainous collectivists ("'All we need to do,' Barisov continued, 'is to help a few people -- journalists, junior officials -- to follow their own instincts'") that would make Ayn Rand blush, and softcore porn that would make anyone blush ("His hands were already moving over her slim, exquisitely molded body... Before he was sure she was ready, her deft, slender fingers pulled him deep inside her"). But the political impetus is stark and obvious: hippies and liberals are pawns of the Reds and those with some integrity left must be turned toward the light so that America can finally do something about Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia! Well, it worked, of course, and we see its bitter fruit falling around us now. Never underestimate the power of bad fiction.

There's more, but aren't you tired of art already?

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