Morris Dickstein's Blog

First published in Dissent (Summer 2016)

Hollywood has always had a strong appetite for fact yet a curiously lax attitude in channeling it. The typical biopic, for example, focused on celebrated figures from Abraham Lincoln to Cole Porter, tended to be sloppy and selective, riddled with crowd-pleasing cliché, more about the myth than the man. After 1934 the Production Code, the industry’s self-censorship regime (first put into place under public pressure in 1930), put whole subjects off limits. Documentaries, going back to those of Robert Flaherty in the 1920s, also tended to manipulate details in ways more suited to fiction than to reportage. The studio look of so many movies of the golden age, right down to their reliance on rear projection and saturated Technicolor, highlighted an almost dreamlike artifice rather than literal veracity. Eventually, though, the restraints of the Code were surmounted and new technologies made location shooting the norm.

Even as special effects exploded, movies inexorably began to look more real even as their stories could remain far-fetched. Social problems once unmentionable now became fodder for both serious filmmaking and cheap exploitation. Civil rights issues gave rise to films as different as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), with an exceptional script by Tony Kushner and a sterling performance in the title role by Daniel Day-Lewis, and Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), buoyed by David Oyelowo’s uncanny impersonation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., recreating a legendary moment in contemporary history. But there was also an irresistible attraction to a galaxy of figures from the entertainment industry itself, often people with tormented private lives ranging from indelible Hollywood stars to cultish jazz icons. Both history and phenomenal celebrity provided pre-sold subjects that traded on characters the mass audience already partly knew.

A striking proportion of films featured in last year’s New York Film Festival dealt with the lives and foibles of real people, all of them from the very recent past, including the opening night film, The Walk, Robert Zemeckis’s 3-D recreation of Philippe Petit’s sensational walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, Danny Boyle’s touted biopic Steve Jobs, with Michael Fassbender impersonating Apple’s late computer guru, and Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s partly fictionalized take on the troubled life of jazz great Miles Davis. The main slate also offered Steven Spielberg’s real-life drama, Bridge of Spies, dealing with the 1962 exchange of Soviet spy Rudolph Abel for the captured American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It centered on the man who arranged the swap, a patient and canny lawyer named James B. Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, whose plain-man persona served as a foil for the darkly inscrutable Mark Rylance, playing Abel. A more daring choice was an indie film by Michael Almereyda, Experimenter. Here a gifted young actor, Peter Skarsgaard, appeared as Stanley Milgram, a professor of social relations at Yale in 1961, who undertook a series of famously controversial studies of ordinary people’s “obedience to authority,” as shown in their willingness, under orders, to administer electric shocks to people posing as “learners” in laboratory trials.

Different as they were, these films represented a heavy dose of ‘reality’ at a festival better known for wilder flights of art and imagination. The festival, coming toward the end of the year, its program replete with ambitious works, typically serves as a prologue to the awards season, though its rarefied offerings rarely win Academy Awards. As it turned out, the Oscar competition for Best Picture centered on three films of exactly the same fact-oriented bent. Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, which proved the unexpected winner, zeroed in on the Boston Globe’s investigation of the priestly child-molesting scandal, long covered up or minimized by the Catholic Church. In a parallel ensemble work, The Big Short, based on a nonfiction best-seller by Michael Lewis, Adam McKay put together a step-by-step recreation of the financial collapse set off by the housing bubble, which nearly sank the U.S. economy when it burst in 2008. Finally, out of a different world and different century came The Revenant, the almost unbelievable, barely endurable story of Hugh Glass. As punishingly incarnated by Leonardo DiCaprio, he was a grizzly mountain man and fur trapper who, in 1823, survived a gruesome bear attack, crawling back to what passed for civilization in search of revenge on those who had left him behind to die. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and filmed by the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, The Revenant was at once a marvelous portrayal of the old west, especially the breathtaking natural world, and an ordeal almost as trying for the actors and audience as it must have been for the characters. Was this simply a case of realism run amuck? Was this the key to a new turn in American filmmaking?

Above all, as this year’s most acclaimed movies showed, the line between fiction and fact, between invention and documentation, grew blurry, at times disappeared entirely. In Experimenter Dr. Milgram has the strange experience of serving as a “consultant” for a (very bad) movie made of his life, with actors playing himself and his co-workers, as we in turn, in a dizzying regress, observe actors playing those actors. On the other hand, several of the lives dramatized in this year’s movies have also been the subject of straightforward documentaries or earlier fictional treatments, including Steve Jobs (Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, out just this year) and Philippe Petit (James Marsh’s widely seen Man on a Wire, 2008, some of it with an actor standing in for Petit in 1974). One of this year’s better biopics, Trumbo, with Bryan Cranston as the blacklisted screenwriter, was preceded in 2007 by a first-rate documentary inspired by the subject’s own piquant letters and personality. In his bracing book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), David Shields argued that the line between fiction and nonfiction has always been hard to pinpoint, especially because any form of storytelling, even memory itself, is highly selective, shaping material rather than just reporting it. “An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined.” It turns out that the very words “fiction” and “nonfiction” do not exist in many languages, even in the categories that separate bookstore shelves.

In focusing so much on real people, this year’s high-profile films can be seen as a deliberately hybrid genre exploring of the no-man’s-land between fact and fiction. Though the emphasis in this round was rarely political, such a heightened attention to the real world can provide a refreshing new twist on the gritty social problem movie inherited from the 1930s and 1940s. The impetus for this kind of film can be traced to the audience’s suspicion of fabricated lives, its preference for a supposedly true story, like a brand name, even when they know it’s not to be trusted. But it’s also a response to the unexpected challenge from cable TV, which has carved out space for timely, topical stories too hot for Hollywood (or the networks) to handle. In the way it takes advantage of a freedom from censorship as well as the far wider scope of a multi-part series, it’s hard to imagine a feature film anything like Showtime’s Masters of Sex, which was based initially on a biography of the pioneer sex researchers Masters and Johnson but grew increasingly fictional with each new season. This year also brought an riveting two-part dramatization of the Madoff story, with a sensational performance by Richard Dreyfuss in the title role. It came with an on-screen warning that it was “inspired by true events” but “some characters, businesses, scenes, and chronologies have been invented, altered, or consolidated for dramatic purposes.”

Aside from the timeliness, the ready-made drama, and the huge impact of their subjects, the appeal of these movies comes from the offer of a more intimate look behind the screaming headlines and endlessly replayed news images. But thanks to the high-octane performance of an actor like Dreyfuss, we can’t help but sympathize with the bedeviled Madoff as his Ponzi scheme collapses, the law closes in, and his family disintegrates. We see the story from his point of view, itself a piece of fictional invention since no reporter has been privy to it. Madoff’s victims – apart from his own luckless family – aren’t personalized in the same way; they come off as greedy, foolish, or naively trusting, just as his chief accuser comes off as nerdy and obsessive.

In some basic way these movies have really been performance pieces, lit up either by individual actors like Dreyfuss, Hanks, or Rylance or by the impressive ensemble work on view in Spotlight or The Big Short. Such gifted impersonations suggest authenticity to an audience leery of fiction, eager for the inside story about real people. Movies have the power to flesh out abstractions even as they funnel them into crafted stories and fill in significant gaps in what we really know, using real events and personal stories to reshape our political understanding. Thanks to postmodernism we’ve come to distrust or dismiss claims of objectivity, skeptical about gaining access to what is real and true, if indeed there is such a thing. Instead we instinctively assume that all representations, including those we make to ourselves, are constructed, contingent, provisional. Yet, when such films are so well made, this knowledge does little to dilute their visceral impact.

It makes a difference whether the characters in question are current or familiar to us, like Madoff, or remote, like the mountain man Hugh Glass, who belongs more to folklore and oral legend than to history. The people in Experimenter, Spotlight, or The Big Short have lived real lives but what most of us know about them, if anything, is negligible. The prime subject of best of these movies is the issues they raise, not the personal character of those who raised them. The fundamental plot of each of these last three films is an investigation, scientific, journalistic, or financial. Milgram casts his inquiry in the light of Nazi atrocities perpetrated by ordinary people, yet he himself has stood accused of deceiving and manipulating his subjects. Peter Skarsgaard’s muted but steely performance is meant to show us that he’s no sadist but a dogged, resourceful scientific inquirer, not at all judgmental but genuinely surprised by what he finds about the willingness to follow orders and inflict pain. Like the protagonists of several of these movies, he often turns from the story to address the audience, a Brechtian device lifted directly from documentaries – a form of authentication, as if to say these events really happened, their meaning a subject for serious reflection. But the movie also has a tinge of the surreal, as with the elephant that sometimes follows Milgram through the corridors as he speaks to us directly, narrating some of his own story.

The social problem movies of the Depression, such as Wild Boys of the Road (1933) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940), not only boasted that they were “ripped from the headlines” but demanded identification with the victims, an empathy for the exploited and the forgotten. “You Have Seen their Faces,” proclaimed Margaret Bourke-White’s collection of photographs. Today this approach seems square and old-fashioned. In The Big Short we do meet one Florida family that will lose its home – the whole housing scene looks like a waste land – but even this has little of the pathos and solemnity of the Depression films. The director and co-screenwriter’s previous movies have mainly been broad comedies, especially the Anchorman films with Will Ferrell. In The Big Short Mckay turns the financial crisis into a riotous farce, an outrageous carnival of con men and suckers, edited in the quick-cutting, anything-goes style of music videos on MTV. Without turning didactic or preachy, at least till near the end, he manages to explain arcane financial instruments while exposing how fraudulent they were and how cynically they’ve been peddled to the greedy and the unwary. Our sympathy, such as it is, is reserved for the handful of men who gradually, incredulously, see through the con and bet daringly on the collapse of the American economy. In other movies about the financial crisis the players have seemed faceless, pallid, leaving the audience largely disengaged. Here they become sharply etched characters, each (under differently weird hair-pieces) incarnated by a different style of acting: Christian Bale’s Asperger’s-like detachment, Steve Carrell’s perpetually short fuse, the almost unrecognizable Brad Pitt’s Zen-like concentration, Ryan Gosling’s self-satisfied sarcasm, and the puppy-dog enthusiasm of two younger traders who apprentice themselves to Pitt.

There’s just such an orchestration of acting rhythms in the Globe’s investigating team in Spotlight, with a bravura, Brando-like performance by Mark Ruffalo and a master class in acting by veterans like Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James. Backing them up is an understated performance by Liev Schreiber as their editor, soft-spoken behind a mask-like beard and raised eyebrows, an outsider to Boston-area politics, who pushes them forward and backs them up. This is rounded off by great supporting work by Len Cariou as an insidiously charming Cardinal Law and Stanley Tucci as the exasperated advocate for some of the victims. No comedy here, only mounting indignation at the scope of the abuse and the insidious cover-up – an improbable attempt, set in motion by Schreiber, to hold the Church accountable as an institution, not simply a handful of bad apples. This institutional corruption is at the heart of both movies, against the grain of Hollywood’s usual, often sentimental focus on individual stories.

At first it seemed that real-life subjects simply provided a way of ransacking the past – or the news cycle – for tried-and-true stories and sure-fire personalities, some of them all too well known. But it soon became clear that this was new terrain, melding documentation and social consciousness with inherently dramatic pieces of fictional invention. The film festival also saw the showing of Michael Moore’s most shamelessly entertaining documentary, Where to Invade Next, a brightly utopian set of forays into nations that handle social welfare and education very differently from us. “Why can’t we do some of that,” he keeps asking. In early films like Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine Moore intrusively elbowed his way into the story. Here he pulls back, playing the wry, faux-naif narrator and tour guide, making complex issues seem disarmingly simple. The result is delightful, with nothing of the grim sobriety of old-style documentaries.

In the end many of these films fit into existing types – the Spielberg as a spy movie, reminiscent of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; The Big Short as serious farce, revealing the absurd side of an awesome, catastrophic scam; Spotlight as a pedantically slow procedural investigation that gradually morphs into a thriller in the vein of All the President’s Men, powered by our contemporary nostalgia for the working press in its finest hours; Experimenter as a dramatized documentary with surreal touches, raising questions about cruelty, obedience, and moral agency that still haunt us. But together they represent facets of a new kind of mainstream movie, not biopic, not history or journalism, not original drama or strict documentary, but bringing together an arsenal of effects from these forms into a potent yet an unusually thoughtful blend.

PROMISED LANDS
by Morris Dickstein
Times Literary Supplement
April 13, 2016

Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt and Mark Shechner, editors
THE NEW DIASPORA
The changing landscape of American Jewish fiction

576pp. Wayne State University Press. $35.99.

978 0 8143 4055 4






Benjamin Schreier
THE IMPOSSIBLE JEW
Identity and the reconstruction of Jewish American literary history

269pp. New York University Press. Paperback, $25.

978 1 4798 7584 7






Hana Wirth-Nesher, editor
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
732pp. Cambridge University Press. £99.99 (US $180).

978 1 107 04820 1

In 1959 a long essay appeared in the TLS (anonymously, of course) that took notice of an important new turn in American writing. It had a vague, slightly patronizing title, “A Vocal Group: The Jewish part in American letters”, as if the headline writer were not quite sure what to make of it. The author, an unknown young critic named Theodore Solotaroff, had been suggested to the paper’s Editor, Alan Pryce-Jones, by a friend from the University of Chicago, Philip Roth. Roth had recently published a handful of audaciously gifted stories that made him a controversial figure in that vocal group. The article caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the newly appointed Editor of Commentary, and on the strength of it he hired its author as an assistant editor. Solotaroff would eventually make a major mark as an editor and writer; Roth would go on to become, well, Philip Roth.

The essay covered considerable ground, taking in not only important post-war Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud but also the acute young critics who helped to clear a space for them, especially the literary intellectuals of the Partisan Review circle – Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv and Irving Howe. In his article Solotaroff returned to Fiedler’s account – in an essay published the year before in ­Midstream magazine – of the “breakthrough” exemplified by Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March(1953), notably his shift from small-scale, carefully crafted fictions to messier, more ambitious works, as well as his ability to write from inside the mind and heart of his feelingful protagonists (Herzog was not yet on the horizon). In writers like the hell-raising Fiedler and the newly emboldened Bellow, Solotaroff saw “a willingness to revolt, to take chances, to trust one’s own instincts and insights and standards, to risk a crushing failure and even ridicule”. By casting Augie as a descendant of Huck Finn, Bellow had ­overcome the provinciality of pre-war Jewish writers to work within the American grain, filtering national motifs through an urban Jewish sensibility. A singular shift had taken place: a literary landscape previously dominated by modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and by social novelists left over from the Depression years, among them John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, had begun to make way for new outsider groups, especially Jews and blacks.

Today that Jewish literary renaissance is sometimes said to have run its course during the first two or three decades after the war when these writers did their best work. Its ­oft-quoted but premature eulogy was delivered by Howe in the introduction to his anthology ­Jewish-American Stories (1977): “Insofar as it draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories”. “There just isn’t enough left of that experience.” But that “insofar” left an opening through which dozens of younger writers have since clambered, among them a new wave of young immigrants from the former USSR. Instead of dying out once those tenement memories had been washed away by suburban assimilation, Jewish-American writing has unexpectedly flourished over the past two decades. The New Diaspora, edited by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt and Mark Shechner, is only the latest and largest of a series of anthologies that make a strong claim for these recent writers, most of them more unambiguously comfortable in their Jewishness than were their predecessors. A few of those included are older (among them Curt Leviant, Edith Pearlman and Joseph Epstein), others (such as Steve Stern, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Ehud Havazelet) have been publishing since the 1980s, while some are already well known though a good deal younger (including ­Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander and Dara Horn), along with other writers just ­finding their footing.

They come with a far greater variety of backgrounds and subjects here than one would have found in the post-war generation. Included are the children of Holocaust survivors as well as new immigrants, a writer from South Africa, with its significant Jewish minority, stories about Sephardic Jews, stories set in Israel, and an abundance of stories by women. Much of the writing looks less personal, more densely cultural than the work of their predecessors. Some of it feels like the product of creative writing courses or advanced degrees in Jewish Studies. Bellow and his contemporaries grew up in Yiddish-speaking households, often very poor, a world in which family ties were dominant and sex was unmentionable. Formed by experiences so different from those of their parents, they crossed a deep divide which left them insecure, emotionally hungry, fickle in love, and self-obsessed. Different forms of psychoanalysis – Freudian, Reichian – served as the background music to their lives, sometimes even the foreground one, as in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). They looked to psychoanalysis for validation, for liberation, but also to fathom explosive inner tensions and contradictions. Once upon a time, say the editors of this volume, “the insistent ‘me, me, me’ had a force and implacability that made the obsessional self virtually a cornerstone of Jewish writing in America”. Now, they note, “gone are the anxious, phobic, dislocated Jewish protagonists for whom America is a landscape of frustrated desire. In their place, we find history”. This more expansive cultural reach can be traced in Roth himself in the contrast between early books like Portnoyand later ones such as American Pastoral (1997) and The Plot against America (2004) – books caught up not simply in personal demons but in the convulsions of several decades of American life.

Such a wider historical purview is less of an advantage to the writer than it might appear. Titanic self-absorption and obsession are woven into the fabric of American literature, going back to Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Roth’s own Sabbath’s Theater (1995) is a late example. The work of the post-war writers was often deployed around a loosely autobiographical protagonist – a Herzog, a Portnoy, suffering in extremis, wallowing in self-pity, oscillating between accusation and anguish – that gave the novels an incandescent intensity rarely found among the more recent writers. It connected them to modernist themes of anxiety, displacement and alienation going back to Dostoevsky’sNotes from Underground and Kafka’s stories. In its place the younger Jewish writers, feeling far more secure, bring a deeper knowledge of Judaism, especially the Orthodox Judaism in which some of them were raised. (The background of the earlier generation was more likely to be in secular Yiddish culture and working-class socialism.) The traumas of the new writers rarely pivot on sex and repression, or the toll exacted by overbearing, uncomprehending parents or lovers. Their lives have been more free and open, more privileged. Many of them have lived in Israel, know Hebrew, and find more drama in the Jewish past than in their own middle-class upbringing. They feel equally comfortable as Jews and Americans, and this loss of urgency or tension can leave their ­stories feeling more anecdotal. When drawn to extreme situations, they are more likely to focus on the aftershocks of the Holocaust, taking stock of the damaged lives of survivors and the “second-hand smoke” breathed in by their children. One of the more powerful Holocaust stories in The New Diaspora, “There Are Jews in My House” by the immigrant writer Lara Vapnyar, is about a woman who takes in a Jewish family under the Nazi occupation, at the risk of her life, only to report them, with a seemingly irrational compulsion, when their presence becomes a burden to her. Though the writer was born in the Soviet Union long after the war, this tale feels experienced, not researched.

“Minyan”, by another immigrant writer, David Bezmozgis, who was born in Latvia, looks back at the human remnants of the world of two generations past. It turns on the difficulty of finding a quorum of ten men, a minyan, to keep an Orthodox service going, but it’s really about the bonds of unconventional love, the weight of the past and the shipwreck of old age. Speaking of traditional prayers and rituals, Bezmozgis writes, “most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences. I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case the motivation was not tradition but history”. This is a story about survivors, alone and vulnerable, as observed, with rare empathy, by someone much younger; its nostalgia is hard-edged. Another deftly atmospheric offering is Ehud Havazelet’s “Six Days”, a family tale in three generations and the first of a sequence of autobiographical stories from his book Like Never Before (1998). Havazelet, who died in November 2015, grew up in an Orthodox family, his grandfather an eminent Brooklyn rabbi, his father a Yeshiva University professor. Here the dreamy father teaches in the Hebrew day school that the son attends, and the story unfolds alternately from their different points of view. “The impression he always got approaching his father’s classroom was of books as an ocean, his father adrift among them, possibly going down.” At home, when the boy calls him for a meal, “his father would look up from his books every time like a man shocked from dreaming, alarmed, happy, smiling to see him”. It is not hard to see why the son might become a writer, but also why he would rebel against the religion of his forebears.

Just as the post-war novelists were in step with a fractious group of remarkable critics, the current surge arrived in tandem with the expanding academic field of Jewish Studies. This has now produced both a masterly work of synthesis, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, and a sweeping postmodern critique, The Impossible Jew by Benjamin Schreier. It has been more than four decades since cross-disciplinary area studies such as Women’s Studies and Black Studies began to offer alternatives to traditional university departments. As offshoots of the politics of the 1960s and the ethnic pride movements of the early 70s, they provided some redress for past exclusions. Often they were politically motivated ways of meeting the demands of minorities and integrating them into the curriculum. Developing later, Jewish Studies never quite fitted into this political pattern, since Jews had already gained acceptance as academic insiders, not rebellious outsiders. Jewish-oriented scholarship had attracted little general attention, but blatant discrimination, still rampant after the war, had long since ebbed. Moreover, no one loved the Western canon, from the Greeks to the Modernists, more than the newly fledged Jewish authors. For all its anti-Semitic threads and overtly Christian values, this was fundamentally a humanist tradition, secularized by the Enlightenment, that had helped to effect Jewish ­emancipation.

Both Wirth-Nesher and Schreier fret about the marginal position of Jewish Studies in the academy, especially in English departments, but they respond to it differently, Wirth-Nesher by compiling thirty-one long essays on every facet of American Jewish literary achievement, Schreier by indicting work in the field itself as backward and unadventurous: in his words, “undertheorized”, “nationalistic” and “identitarian” in its methods, politics and ideology. Schreier admits jauntily that he is “criticizing the people I want to convince”, writing “a polemic, full of vitriol and bile”, but his goal is elusive if not misguided. Was there ever a chance that Jewish Studies would be warmly welcomed into the various networks of American and minority studies currently imbued with the politics of anti-Zionism, boycott and divestment? For the usual minority studies theorists Jews are no longer the designated victims but the oppressors. Besides this political mismatch there is a conflict over method. Most Jewish Studies scholars continue to work in traditional ways, empirically, connecting texts and fictional characters with historical agents and the social realities of the wider world. Up-to-date Cultural Studies theorists instead tend to be text-oriented, politically driven critics of ideology. For them identity is socially or linguistically constructed. By this light the Jew cannot be defined ethnically or genetically. While it strikes a radical pose, this anti-essentialism, grounded in the postmodern critique of the unified subject, is today’s academic orthodoxy, at least in the humanities, if not in Jewish Studies. In line with the theorists, Schreier describes identity as inherently problematic, always in formation, and enlists writing and scholarship as vehicles for “de-stabilizing” and reconstructing it rather than representing that which is already known. He questions the historicism that connects the text to the world and resists reading literature for what it is “about”, a word he likes to put between scare quotes.

Schreier’s book is a narrow but bracing polemic, difficult, repetitive, clotted with jargon, yet burning with a fiery sense of purpose. Like many fierce polemics, however, it is directed at something of a straw man. After all, no literature worth its salt treats its characters as unproblematic representatives of an abstract, self-evident biological category or social type. Few literary works figure in The Impossible Jew and the handful brought forth tend to stack the deck. One of them is not literature at all but “Under Forty”, a symposium from 1944 of younger intellectuals appearing in the Contemporary Jewish Record, the forerunner ofCommentary. Asked to identify specifically Jewish elements in their work, critics like Kazin and Trilling demurred, recoiling from the organized Jewish community, affirming their own Jewish roots but refusing to be labelled or hyphenated. Trilling, though acknowledging his Jewishness as “one of the shaping conditions of my temperament”, wrote: “I do not think of myself as a ‘Jewish writer.’ I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish”. He admitted that 1944 was an awkward moment, amid untold suffering, to distance oneself from one’s fellow Jews, but insisted that “the great fact for American Jews is their exclusion from certain parts of the general life”, fostering “a willingness to be provincial and parochial”. It was this “general life”, the appeal of the Western and American mainstream, that called out to him.

Schreier ingeniously mobilizes such refusals to explore the gap between merely biological origins and more complex identities forged in the work of cultural production – the space, as he puts it, “between genealogy and vocation, between group and action, between text and archive”. But the goal for Trilling and his contemporaries was not a “de-stabilized”, postmodern identity. Shaking off the constraints of the ghetto and the social barriers still confronting Jews, they instead laid claim to the universal identity that Western culture, democratic freedoms and (for a time) Marxist politics seemed to promise. They were reaching for the full range of human possibility, not for self-realization as Jews; nothing could be further from the flaunting of ethnic or racial origins that came into fashion with multi­culturalism. It makes little sense to turn the New York intellectuals into postmodernists avant la lettre, simply because they found it limiting or ghettoizing to see their work described as distinctly Jewish.

Schreier finds a better match for his argument in Philip Roth’s key novelThe Counterlife (1986). Roth’s typical identity games, his refusal of any ethnic claims on him, whether from American Jews or from zealots in Israel, do suggest that identity is fluid and malleable, in formation, not merely given, especially in the ways that writers perform variations on their own experience. Accused of being simply an autobiographical writer, little able to make anything up, he evolved his own form of postmodern invention, not as theory but in defence of his own creative process, conjuring up alternative plots as well as an alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. Writing about Israel, Roth discovered that for him the diaspora was actually the promised land, the place where he could forge his own loyalties. But it’s hard to see how his late work could be any kind of model for Jewish Studies, as Schreier argues it should be.

If Solotaroff’s essay was a moment of recognition for Jewish-American writing, the Cambridge History marks a milestone in its institutionalization. In 2003 Wirth-Nesher and Michael Kramer edited a Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, but the new volume is conceived on a grander scale. Like the editors of The New Diaspora, Wirth-Nesher affirms the multiplicity of Jewish writing – and the fluidity of Jewish identity – by spreading her net as widely as possible. The book includes essays on historical periods, on major genres, on American writing in different languages – Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino – on Canadian and Latin American Jewish writers. There are thematic essays on literature set in Israel, on New York as a location and subject, on the black–Jewish dialogue, on the treatment of the Holocaust, on translation, anthologies, intellectuals, popular culture, film, Jewish humour, graphic novels. The book is as catholic in style as in its profusion of topics. Some chapters cover many works, though never in the numbing catalogue style that once made most literary histories seem such a bore – hopelessly superficial. Others build an argument on a handful of exemplary works. The editor has clearly given free rein to her contributors, holding them only to an intelligent standard and a welcome clarity of style. Only a reviewer would read the book straight through but in fact it reads particularly well. Even the overlaps make good sense. Some writers such as Abraham Cahan, a pioneer of both Jewish journalism (in Yiddish) and American Jewish fiction (in English), or the poet and early Zionist Emma Lazarus, reappear in several chapters since their protean careers can be usefully grasped from different angles.

Such prismatic viewpoints accord well with a more mobile and contingent sense of identity. Leaving aside the Orthodox establishment, today only stand-up comedians and die-hard racists cling to the usual stereotypes about Jewish identity. Repeated efforts to define who was a Jew and what constituted Jewish literature have now given way to an emphasis on hybridity and complexity. The range of the Cambridge History reflects a refusal to close down the subject and police its borders. In another era, the Jewish moguls set out to create Hollywood as an American industry by bleaching out nearly all trace of its Jewishness, indeed of ethnic origins altogether. This was assimilation with a vengeance, a faux-American dream, classless and homogeneous. As Jonathan Freedman shows here in his essay “Jews and Film”, this later lost its hold when actors and directors such as Barbra Streisand and the Coen brothers came to “use the film industry to carve out new (and not unproblematic) itineraries for themselves in eras of ethnic revival, gender revolution, and postmodern hybrid identity formations challenging the very category ‘Jew’ itself”. The same shift can be mapped in literary history. Allen Guttmann’s pioneering work of 1971,The Jewish Writer in America, tried to tell the whole story as a single narrative, focused on individual authors and on the transition from immigration to assimilation. Wirth-Nesher’s book is based on the understanding that no master narrative can ever be convincing: to encompass a history marked by alternative paths and serious ruptures we must move (in Dan Miron’s terms) “from continuity to contiguity”.

The contributors to the History are attuned to such dissonance and discontinuity. Anita Norich’s probing essay on the “Poetics and Politics of Translation” questions whether translations from the Yiddish somehow betray the language, not out of inaccuracy but by suggesting “that Yiddish has no audience or future . . . . Translation becomes, potentially, a form of obliteration”. On the other hand, it can also be seen as “an act of resistance to history”, a “defiant gesture aimed at preserving the traces of a culture that underwent dreadful transformations”. This may be especially true now that “translation has increasingly been understood as serving the original text and not the innocent reader. The reader is made to work harder, to perceive his or her own language as strange. Translators are now more likely to foreignize the target language rather than obscure the ­differences between source and target”. Like such translations, the new Cambridge History is all about difference. In her excellent piece about Jewish literary anthologies, Wendy I. Zierler resurrects the work of Leo Schwarz in the 1930s, books like The Jewish Caravan (1935) and A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature (1937), works of serious ethnic pride that were once ubiquitous gifts for every bar mitzvah boy. From there she traces a path to rigorously critical anthologies like Howe’s and Eliezer Greenberg’s influential collections of Yiddish poetry and prose and the comprehensive Norton anthology of 2001, the first that laid out this literature as canonical work for classroom use.

The vigorous renewal of Jewish-American writing today remains a genuine surprise. The very assimilation that was thought to have thinned out its material and toned down its voice has instead given impetus to new ways of being Jewish and of writing about it, yet today’s Jewish writing is also completely entwined with the main lines of American ­literature. Long ago a graduate student who had grown up a Catholic told me how much she envied Jews. When she stopped believing, stopped taking communion, she said, she became an ex-Catholic, but secularism, even atheism, were simply alternative ways of being Jewish. This was partly because Jews, confusingly, were an ethnic or national as well as a religious group, but also because even then, in America at least, Judaism, free of any central authority, had a much greater tolerance for diversity. In subsequent decades, younger Jews, in line with the American belief in self-making, took up that freedom wholeheartedly. Religious rituals like the Passover seder, which once brooked little variation, are now tailored to every taste and spiritual need, from the most traditional to the most individual, from strictly Orthodox to feminist, gay, or vegan. The same can be said about the new writers. Finding their own way, they work out of an embarrassment of choice, not the burden of necessity. Time will tell whether this proves to be a source of power.

Read Morris Dickstein’s Review of THE NEW DIASPORA: The changing landscape of American Jewish fiction, THE IMPOSSIBLE JEW: Identity and the reconstruction of Jewish American literary history, and THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Listen to the TLS podcast Being Jewish Being American in which Toby Lichtig talks to Morris Dickstein about the ever-evolving relationship between Judaism and American literature.

Published: 13 April 2016

Ways of Being Jewish

In 1959 a long essay appeared in the TLS (anonymously, of course) that took notice of an important new turn in American writing. It had a vague, slightly patronizing title, “A Vocal Group: The Jewish part in American letters”, as if the headline writer were not quite sure what to make of it. The author, an unknown young critic named Theodore Solotaroff, had been suggested to the paper’s Editor, Alan Pryce-Jones, by a friend from the University of Chicago, Philip Roth. Roth had recently published a handful of audaciously gifted stories that made him a controversial figure in that vocal group. The article caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the newly appointed Editor of Commentary, and on the strength of it he hired its author as an assistant editor. Solotaroff would eventually make a major mark as an editor and writer; Roth would go on to become, well, Philip Roth.

The essay covered considerable ground, taking in not only important post-war Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud but also the acute young critics who helped to clear a space for them, especially the literary intellectuals of the Partisan Review circle – Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv and Irving Howe. In his article Solotaroff returned to Fiedler’s account – in an essay published the year before in Midstream magazine – of the “breakthrough” exemplified by Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (1953), notably his shift from small-scale, carefully crafted fictions to messier, more ambitious works, as well as his ability to write from inside the mind and heart of his feelingful protagonists (Herzog was not yet on the horizon). In writers like the hell-raising Fiedler and the newly emboldened Bellow, Solotaroff saw “a willingness to revolt, to take chances, to trust one’s own instincts and insights and standards, to risk a crushing failure and even ridicule”. By casting Augie as a descendant of Huck Finn, Bellow had overcome the provinciality of pre-war Jewish writers to work within the American grain, filtering national motifs through an urban Jewish sensibility. A singular shift had taken place: a literary landscape previously dominated by modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and by social novelists left over from the Depression years, among them John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, had begun to make way for new outsider groups, especially Jews and blacks.

Read More

Read Paul Pines’s review of Why Not Say What Happened.

What the Shadow Knows PDF

What the Shadow Knows
Morris Dickstein.
Why Not Say What Happened. Liverwright, 2015.
Paul Pines

There was another light in the room now, a thousand times brighter than the night-lights, and in the time we have taken to say this, it has been in all the drawers in the nursery, looking for Peter’s shadow…

James M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Enter, The Shadow
There are many reasons to pursue Memoir, arguably the most intimate form of literary expression. Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions admitted to once stealing an apple from an orchard, and in so doing linked his personal experience to Adam’s expulsion from Eden, and his life’s work addressing the commission and consequences of Original Sin, but not before disclosing that as a young Platonist with strong appetites, he wished to prolong his wickedness a little longer before assuming the robes of ecclesiastical authority. Rousseau hoped to reclaim his original Innocence by writing an absolutely honest memoir confessing his darkest acts and feelings, among these pissing in a cooking pot, and sexual arousal in response to beatings by a dominating Nanny. Modernist Edward Dahlberg, the disposable son of an itinerant lady barber, unleashes a cry of outraged innocence no amount of disclosure can assuage in the eponymous Confessions of Edward Dahlberg. Enter Morris Dickstein, whose earlier books, Dancing in the Dark, and Gates of Eden about the Great Depression and the apocalyptic ‘60s, mark him as one of the most astute cultural commentators of our time. Now, for his own reasons, he has chosen to become his own subject in his memoir entitled, Why Not Say What Happened, A Sentimental Education.
Read More

 

First published in the Times Literary Supplement (Jan. 2, 2015)

Among many obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the settlements established on the West Bank since 1967 seem peculiarly intractable. Part of their purpose was to create “facts on the ground” to inhibit the formation of a Palestinian state. Still, when Israel gave up the Jewish settlements in Sinai in 1982 and again in Gaza in 2005, the settlers appeared to have their backs to the wall. Instead, their influence over Israel’s politics, including the current governing coalition, has never been greater. Though many were drawn by economic incentives, others fit the more swaggering mold of gun-toting ideological zealots, motivated by biblically-rooted religion or nationalism. This is the stereotype that Assaf Gavron sets out to complicate in his new novel, The Hilltop.

Though the issues raised are grave, Assaf Gavron’s tack is surprisingly light-hearted, humorous, satirical. A previous book, Almost Dead, was a slashing, sometimes surreal comic novel about terrorism, including suicide bombing, told alternately in the first person from a Jewish and an Arab point of view. The Hilltop is a more conventional but also more ambitious work, a distanced overview, meticulously realistic, centering on everyday life in one corner of the territories. The setting is Ma’aleh Hermesh C, an improvised outpost of a handful of families on the fringe of an established settlement. It can’t be found on any map – hence can’t be evacuated – because officially it was evacuated years ago. It squats on land whose legal status is absurdly ambiguous. In a page out of Catch-22, it doesn’t exist though its residents are back, living under the protection of the Israeli army.

To Israel’s defense minister it’s become an annoyance, especially after a serendipitous press report draws the attention of the American government, even the president. The aggrieved defense minister feels “he went there to support them, and they spat on him. In any normal country,” he thinks, “ the outpost would have been dismantled and they would have been thrown in jail.” These settlers, though religious, are hardly extremists or militant fundamentalists. They’re hard-working, mostly well-meaning, with little patience for the “lefties” who challenge them. One of the founders, the genial Othniel Assis, simply knows how to play the bureaucratic game, exploiting loopholes and pulling strings whenever the outpost is threatened.

For some, the appeal of the territories is like that of the Wild West. Roni Kupper, whose recent past is clouded in mystery, returns from America to hole up in the outpost with his brother Gabi, who also has been through unspoken troubles. At loose ends, Roni hatches up a scheme to buy artisanal olive oil from a nearby Palestinian farmer and market it to Tel Aviv yuppies. Roni is secular and entrepreneurial while his brother, a loner, has become devoutly religious. Orphaned at a young age, raised by adoptive parents in a kibbutz in the north, they implicitly represent the two divergent wings of Israeli society, both cut off from the rugged, state-building generation of early socialist Zionists. To Roni, who has failed elsewhere, the territories offer a clean slate where he might start afresh. “There are no rules, you can make them up as you go along. It’s so cheap here, it’s another country.” By this point he has burned his bridges, first in Tel Aviv, where he’d opened a string of bars, then in the United States. There, escaping Israel’s “shallow waters of provincialism,” he’d had an improbably swift rise as an investment banker and Wall Street broker, only to be undone by his increasingly desperate financial maneuvers and brought down by the crash of 2008.

For his little brother, “the somewhat detached, somewhat impressionable, somewhat searching Gabi,” the outpost is also a refuge, a hideaway, but it has also given meaning to his restless life. We learn his story, like Roni’s, only in a long Faulknerian flashback. As in a layered tale like Faulkner’s Light in August, though without the same emotional urgency, we make sense of Gavron’s shrouded characters only long after we first encounter them. The boys’ parents, we discover, died in an absurd road accident, killed under fire, not by a stray shell but in a collision with a cow frightened by the shell. Since then Gabi’s life has been punctuated by episodes of violent rage, undermining his place in the kibbutz and propelling him as a teenager to act out and run away. These angry outbreaks cut short his army service and help wreck his marriage, after he becomes abusive to his young son. Almost by chance he gravitates toward religious observance, finding satisfying work and community, even renewed love, in this haphazard setting. Amid the makeshift trailers he begins building a small cabin of his own – itself a miniature outpost – on the nearby hilltop, and this proves therapeutic for him, balm to a restless soul.

To his more skeptical brother, who will eventually decamp for the secular world of Tel Aviv, the settlement feels too much like the kibbutz on which they grew up, “a hole at the end of the world, a small idealistic society, shut off and holier-than-thou.” This linkage to the kibbutz is the settlers’ great pride; they see themselves as rightful heirs to the chalutzim, the early Zionist pioneers who first settled the land. The novel neither endorses nor rejects this claim, centering instead on these two brothers whose lives have come unraveled, one of whom finds peace in the settlement while the other abandons it. The Hilltop has been acclaimed as a political novel, grounded in two years of research in the West Bank, yet its politics are hard to fathom. In interviews Gavron makes clear that he stands with the Tel Aviv secularists and questions the settlement project. Instead he uses fiction to explore the human reality of the settlers’ lives.

Like his contemporary, Etgar Keret, Gavron represents a distinctly new generation in Israeli writing. Though it sometimes echoes the wry, ironic tone of Amos Oz, Gavron’s novel, directed at a wide audience, eschews the symbolic freight and biblical intertexture of so much earlier Israeli fiction. Steeped in contemporary references, his work is not shadowed by the Holocaust or the ‘48 War of Independence. Born to immigrants from the UK in 1968, at home in English, he has retranslated books like Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Salinger’s short stories into Hebrew, along with the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander. He feels completely at home in the vernacular and, thanks to a fluent, idiomatic translation by Steven Cohen, The Hilltop reads more like an American novel than a translation. Here people will “let you off the hook,” know how to “score the best weed,” or feel “stressed out.” We’re told that “Gabi lost it sometimes” when his young son “learned exactly which buttons to push to anger his father.” These are not simply verbal turns but reflect the book’s transnational flavor, especially as some of the backstory of both brothers evokes the Israeli diaspora in America. While the brothers’ earlier lives are not always convincing, Gavron fills them in with concrete, closely observed detail. He can tell you what it feels like to land for the first time in a bustling American airport and walk the mean streets of New York. Riding the subway for the first time, Gabi’s impressions take on an almost preternatural vividness.

“He swayed to the metallic rattling over bridges and underground. . . . One hand remained firmly attached to the bag, his eyes fixed constantly on a new target: huge billboards, stretches of tenement housing as far as the eye could see, two black men in baggy clothes, endless graffiti. . . . A chubby and unattractive girl with a blank expression, headphones from a music player wrapped around her head, which was wet at the top. Orange and yellow seats emptying and filling. Doors sliding to open and close. An intercom system that scrambled the words. A hot and stifling small, and different, everything was so different.”

All this is exotic to a young traveler from a small country but, as elsewhere, Gavron’s storytelling gift comes through less in the dramatic turns of a plot than in the more modest interstices of the ordinary, the quotidian.

Gavron surrounds the brothers with a cast of secondary characters as ample as in any Russian novel. Structured as a mosaic of small chapters and multiple viewpoints, the book allows the reader to identify with these diverse, affable, pragmatic settlers; in doing so The Hilltop inevitably lays out a case for them. It satirizes the legal shenanigans and official hypocrisy that empower the settlers, the army that shields them, the American millionaires who support them, but we see the world only from the settlers’ perspective. Except for a few rock-throwing incidents, they live in peace with their Arab neighbors, even join them in opposing a wall of separation, yet – unlike in Almost Dead – the Palestinian voice is never heard.

This built-in advocacy, nowhere explicit, perhaps even unintentional, comes through in the book’s unexpectedly soft conclusion, where it takes on the aura of a timeless fairy tale. Until then, almost the only violent confrontations have occurred in the video games played by a settler’s teenage son, aggressive behavior he comes to regret. In the real world an order finally comes through once again for the army to clear the outpost. At the same time, a drunken group of Purim revelers have gone down in costume on a friendly visit to the nearby Arab village, only to be met by stones, threats, and comical misunderstanding. This encounter draws the attention of the military, so that the outpost itself survives out of a moment’s distraction, the very inattention that has allowed it to slip through the cracks till now. Though not exactly credible, this is in one sense realistic – the status of these settlements is at once illegal and immutable – and it fits the benign logic of the novel, as if nothing very terrible could ever happen here. We finally learn which settlers once torched some of the Arabs’ age-old olive trees, but even such a heinous deed has no consequences. The forgiving spirit of humor, the license of carnival, the humanizing empathy of fiction, has relaxed political judgment and we are left with the workaday ways that ordinary people muddle through.

(My longtime friend Marshall Berman died suddenly on September 11, 2013, just a year ago today. To mark his yahrzeit I’m posting some remarks I made at a memorial service  in November at City College, where he taught for over 45 years.)

I first met Marshall in 1958 or ‘59 when we were sophomores at Columbia – can it be that long ago? We arrived at this melting pot on Morningside Heights from different places. He was a secular Jew from the Bronx who’d already gotten a terrific education at one of New York’s elite public schools, the Bronx High School of Science. I was a yeshiva boy from the Lower East Side and Queens, who had finally rebelled against a parochial school curriculum focused as much on Talmud as on English and math. He had been left raw and vulnerable a few years earlier by the early death of his father. Living at home, growing up too soon, he was the man in the family, the source of emotional support for his widowed mother and younger sister, while I had managed (with difficulty) to break away by moving out. Though he was in history and I was in English, we shared a vast intellectual hunger fed by many of the same books: classics of the Western tradition beginning with Homer and Plato, subversive modern works from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to T. S. Eliot, radical contemporary books by the likes of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Norman O. Brown, and the Beats.

When Sam Cherniak, a mutual friend, and I started a literary supplement to the Columbia Daily Spectator, Marshall was the first person we pressed to write, though writing did not come easy to him then. After insistent cajoling we extracted from him a remarkable essay on the outlaw psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the prophet of the orgasm, who was almost forgotten and had recently died in prison. It was a foretaste of many essays and reviews he would wrote over the next five decades, not least in its feeling for Reich’s provocative synthesis of socialism and sexuality. The conservative, puritanical mood of the 1950s was breaking up and we were eager to help bury it for good.

He was only one in our group who had a steady girlfriend, Rita, dark-haired, disturbed, voluptuous. They cleaved to each other like orphans in a storm but she would eventually break down and be hospitalized, while he would survive and thrive. Intellectually, Marshall was always getting ahead of himself, boldly taking graduate courses with Columbia’s stellar intellectuals like Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun, writing a sweeping essay on Romanticism- a subject on which we’d teach a course together twenty years later – and plunging into a senior seminar on the Enlightenment that drew him to Rousseau and would eventually lead to his first book, The Politics of Authenticity.

Marshall’s writing, even then, was singular for its luminous intelligence and direct conversational immediacy. With anecdotal ease, he could crack open difficult subjects and make them invitingly accessible. His work was always grounded in close reading yet he had a knack for taking his readers by the hand, leading them through a complicated discussion as if he were telling a story, unfolding a drama of ideas that never lost sight of actual people. After winning a coveted fellowship to Oxford, he performed such a feat of exposition with Karl Marx in a thesis overseen by Isaiah Berlin. In the process he became some kind of Marxist, not the dogmatic or theoretical kind, not the blood-curdling prophet of class struggle or revolutionary violence, but someone who believed that the happiness of individuals, their full self-expression, was the key to the well-being of the community, the basis for any just and satisfying social order. For Marshall the heart of Marxism was the vision of a society “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” in the words of the Communist Manifesto. With special evangelical fervor, he saw good sex as a cornerstone of a good society, though I doubt this is what Marx and Engels had in mind, not even the dancing Marx on the cover of one of his books, significantly called Adventures in Marxism.

We can certainly wonder whether there’s ever been such a society, but in the 1960s it seemed more possible than ever before. That period – with its unlikely synergy between the anarchist ideas of the counterculture and the moral anguish of the New Left – came to Marshall as a precious gift he rarely questioned and never discarded. He loved its iconic figures like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Goodman, and felt their work survived in the rebel spirit of rap and graffiti. His striking appearance – the billboard T-shirts, the shaggy, unkempt beard – were an in-your-face expression of his loyalty to that era. Yet he lived his life as a professor, not a sandaled hippie, and lived it not in a rural commune but amid the democratic cacophony of New York and its public university. Here he promoted the “free development” of hundreds of students whose parents never dreamed of attending a university; here he encouraged them to extend and transcend themselves.

With these kids, and in his own later writing, he explored the ideas of writers who had electrified him in his youth, initiating his students into the life of the mind. With them he analyzed the urban environment he considered synonymous with freedom, diversity, and authentic self-realization. Marshall himself was a visionary but hardly starry-eyed. There was no one I ran into more often on the street, no friend more given to conversation, intimacy, roving curiosity. In the face of his bubbling enthusiasms, I would joshingly accuse him of exaggerating, of romanticizing, and he would sometimes tax me with holding back, being too much the critic, not letting go – that categorical imperative of the 1960s. I thought our conversation, forged when we were so young, would go on forever. He asked me if I would join a seminar where we could go on talking after we all retired, though I doubt he planned ever to retire. It shocks me that I can’t pick up the phone and reach him at the other end. But his lyrical writing speaks to us, as it will for a long time to come, and somewhere, I hope, he might still be listening in.

First published in Tablet (posted July 3, 2014)

My cousin Harry Krug, who died early last year at 88, was related to me only by marriage but he couldn’t have been more braided into my mother’s extended family. This matriarchy was dominated by strong-minded women like Harry’s mother-in-law, my aunt Lily, stubborn and spiky as a Russian peasant, and Harry’s wife Pauline, a force of nature, who had crisp reactions to everyone she knew. The climate of our clan was heated, the atmosphere operatic; the men who married in had to surrender their passports and go native, as my mild-mannered father readily did, trading in his dour Polish kin for some Russian joie de vivre. Harry too jumped in with both feet. Through stormy scenes he remained as genial and unflappable as his wife was volatile. With his generous girth and dark good looks, his twinkly, mischievous smile, it seemed impossible to upset him. Whatever the weather, no one was going to spoil his day.

Pauline and Harry, both born in 1924, met when they were twelve and became high school sweethearts on the Lower East Side. They always planned to marry but the war intervened and he was tapped for what would one day be dubbed the Greatest Generation. A year or so before he died I called him as part of my research for a memoir – he was one of the few people still around who had vivid memories of my childhood. Instead we spoke for an hour about his army experiences, none of which I had heard before, since he rarely talked about himself. Conversations with Harry usually focused on your life, about which he was endlessly curious, joshing, and funny. Unlike New York’s late, voluble mayor, he always wanted to know how you were doing.

When he was drafted at eighteen, he told me, he was a complete innocent, totally unworldly. He had never been out of New York, had barely left the Lower East Side, never smoked or drank (not even coffee, he recalled with amazement), and never knowingly strayed from kosher food. In the army at first he abstained from eating meat, only to find he couldn’t keep going on such a meager diet. Then, on his father’s advice, he tried simply to avoid pork. But after consuming what seemed like a veal chop, he found instead that he’d eaten a pork chop. This became part of his ongoing education.

At boot camp in Louisiana, Camp Claiborne, he was thrown together with even more clueless men from the South and Midwest who habitually razzed him as a Jewboy, a kike. They were shipped overseas on the Queen Mary, four thousand men in a single rocky, rainy sailing, then stationed in London preparing for the invasion of France. I had seen Saving Private Ryan but Harry’s description of the D-Day landing went beyond those gory images, with men falling all around him and corpses littering the beach. They remained pinned down on the beach for a full week. To me such a life-and-death situation was difficult to imagine, as hellish as being thrown into a concentration camp. Eventually he was sent to the deep-water port of Cherbourg, which had been liberated three weeks after D-Day. “The men around me had more brawn than brains,” he told me. “Even the officers made fun of Jews, but they found I was good with numbers and set me to work.” He survived the next months to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, a near disaster for the Allies, then learned that back home his mother had died. She was never told he had been sent overseas.

Emerging from the war penniless and ambitious, Harry followed a path for his generation: he married the girl he left behind and they began having children almost immediately. He moved from company to company, from sales to management; they relocated from one gilded suburb to another. Eventually he became a well-paid executive, the father of four growing children on whom he doted extravagantly. Their married life had begun in a walk-up apartment on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, where the elevated train roared in their ears, but they moved on to towns on Long Island, then to St. Louis, Cleveland, and finally to New Jersey. Family and child-rearing were the one constant, for no one loved children more than Harry, and no one I knew was so good with them – easy, natural, and ingratiating. I felt this as a child, sixteen years his junior, and I saw it again in the ways he effortlessly engaged with my own kids and his grandchildren, who all got to spend time with him. “He had a large personality, he was funny, and he really seemed to like talking to you,” my daughter told me the other day. “He remembered everything you’d said, so you felt acknowledged by him. Most people don’t really like to talk to kids. You could tell he did.”

Never at a loss for words, he took kids seriously, quizzed them about their lives. There was something irrepressibly childlike about him, a sense of wonder he never gave up. Any project, any excursion was worthwhile if children came along. He teased them, tickled them with his banter, took them fishing – someone really interested in what they had to say. But he was just as gregarious with strangers, flirting harmlessly with waitresses, tipping generously, showering them with compliments and mock complaints until he set them giggling.

It was during the early summers of his marriage (and my childhood) that I got to know him best. We all called him Poogie, his wife’s nickname for him; “Harry” was reserved for formal occasions. Wherever he and his family were living then, once school let out they would return each year to Rocky Point, then a small blue-collar town on the Long Island Sound. There my mother and three of her brothers and sisters had built or bought rude cottages – bungalows, we always called them. There I grew up in a boisterous crowd of aunts, uncles, and cousins, some with histrionic personalities reminiscent of the Yiddish theater. For the sake of their children, but also out of attachment to the family, especially her feisty, widowed mother, Pauline and Harry would move their kids from a comfortable suburban ranch house to the equivalent of a railroad flat filled with beds, lacking every amenity imaginable. Well into the 1950s the house, built room by room with help from relatives and friends, had neither running water (instead, a hand-pump in the back yard) nor an indoor toilet (only a one-seater outhouse far back on the small lot). The bungalow also came equipped with a difficult mother-in-law. Yet he loved to return to this poor people’s paradise, where he taught himself carpentry and put his working life out of mind, since this was where he and the kids felt most at home.

During the day this tribe of cousins frolicked in sun, sea, and sand on pebbly beaches that dotted the pristine surf of the Sound. Then, as twilight descended, with no television for distraction, the men played cards on screened-in porches while the women gathered on the lawn for a never-ending stream of gossip, seasoned with ancient family feuds. So I grew up amid a gaggle of surrogate parents, Pauline and Poogie my favorites among them, for they were younger, bolder, less anxiety-ridden than my own folks. “I’m cold, go put on a sweater,” my mother would say to us, no matter how warm the evening. This amused Pauline so much she loved repeating it.

These summers ended when I turned fifteen and went off to jobs in Catskills hotels and in summer camps in the Poconos. I saw Harry, Pauline, and their kids less frequently but the early bond never weakened. They were among the few who welcomed my blunt, plain-speaking wife – born of German-Jewish, not East European extraction – into the family, and she took to them as much as I did. Harry appreciated forceful women, appreciated women in general, while Pauline took pleasure in a kindred spirit, prone to speak her mind, who was treated like an outsider by my mother and her two sisters. Pauline was a fountain of vitality, a seemingly unstoppable force, but to everyone’s dismay she fell ill and died of breast cancer, the family curse, in the mid-1990s. At her funeral Harry seemed, for the only time in his life, completely blighted. He eventually married again, luckily to a woman as warm and sociable as he was. Still full of family feeling, he became almost as involved with her children and grandchildren as with his own. “We thought we might have five good years together,” Shirley told me later. “We had thirteen.” He was grateful for the second chance.

Through all these changes we never lost contact. I would always be something of a kid to him, and as I grew older, after my parents died, my friendship with this last surviving throwback to my youth gave me a rare pleasure. Our phone conversations would always begin in the same way, “Hi, this is your favorite cousin,” to which the response would be, “Well, this is your favorite cousin.” He kept track of everyone’s birthday, and I mean everyone, children, grandchildren, cousins, spouses, no doubt many friends as well. He called partly with good wishes but mostly just to keep up. In later years he tried email and Facebook, convenient for posting pictures, but the telephone was his medium as he grew older. He typically wanted to know if I had published anything and would scold me if I hadn’t sent it to him, not necessarily to read but at least to put it on display, if only as a conversation piece, some grist for the daily mill.

Now that he is gone I’ve lost not only a warm friend but one of the few remaining links with my own past. A chunk of generational history was writ large in his journey, a circuit from the depths of Depression and bloody warfare to unexpected peacetime prosperity, from a miserably poor immigrant ghetto to handsome suburban comfort and, finally, to busy retirement in a warmer climate, in his case a gated community in Florida. Not all the war veterans prospered in the world that followed, the thriving economy, a postwar golden age for the nuclear family, but Harry was fortunate as well as canny and cautious. Like most children of the Depression he was careful about money, even frugal, but open-handed with those close to him. When my son became a junior stock broker, directly out of college, Harry was one of his first clients, not venturing much money but eager to show him the ropes, not afraid to be demanding, unpredictable, as if tutoring him with tough love while keeping an eye cocked for his own investment opportunities. An optimist to the last, he felt there was always something that might turn up, a stock tip, a mutual fund, and it made him quite happy to keep it all in the family.

 

First posted on NBCC Reads (October 29, 2013)

So many of the finest works of the last 38 years have been nominated for the NBCC book awards that it’s almost impossible to choose a single title. Many of the best did not finally win the award, including Irving Howe’s seminal World of Our Fathers, Norman Mailer’s remarkable nonfiction novel The Executioner’s Song, J. M. Coetzee’s best novel, Disgrace, Marshall Berman’s irresistible study of modernism, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Paul Zweig’s unsurpassed biography of Whitman, and Wayne Koestenbaum’s delicious meditation on gay men and opera, The Queen’s Throat, to name just a few. Among those that did win the award, my favorites, singled out almost at random, include Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Joseph Frank’s definitive biography of Dostoevsky, perhaps Philip Roth’s best novel, The Counterlife, C. K. Williams’s collection of poems, Flesh and Blood, Marilynne Robinson’s poignantly intelligent Gilead, and two enduring collections of essays, Joseph Brodsky’s Less Than One and Gary Giddins’s Visions of Jazz. But faced with the impossible demand to select only one title, I’d have to plump for The Stories of John Cheever.

First of all the stories, one after another, are simply wonderful – beautifully shaped, seductively written – the evolving arc of a whole career, brought together with perfect tact. A good dozen of them are among the outstanding stories of the postwar years – quite a batting average. Then too, the book came out at a low ebb of Cheever’s career: his writing had changed, The New Yorker, long his literary home, had begun turning down his work, which had nevertheless been typed, quite wrongly, as a certain kind of New Yorker story, teacup tragedies about predictable material – the genteel, gentile middle class, the terminally boring life of the suburbs – in a predictable tone of bland, well-mannered civility. Also, Cheever’s reception had turned sour; his edgiest novel, Falconer, had hardly been understood by reviewers, let alone welcomed. But reading the stories en masse overturned the stereotypes about him and his work, which now looked much darker and more daring than anyone had realized. There was a dawning sense of his conflicted, surprisingly tormented nature, which would be amply confirmed by the posthumous publication of his journals. Finally, there was the man himself, who charmed the pants off everyone as he accepted the award. I can still recall the wicked grin on his face, along with that wry New England tone of voice, when he said that he was so used to presenting awards to his friend Saul Bellow (whom he hugely admired) that he never expected to take one home himself. It was a performance, one of the most winning I’ve seen, but it was also heartfelt, a long overdue recognition that had to be the best reason for handing out these awards in the first place.

First published in The Threepenny Review (Fall 2013)

Novels demand a projection of self that varies with your moods and seasons, the stages of your life. Reading fiction is a way of finding yourself by losing yourself – getting immersed in stories about other people. It makes strange places seem familiar yet defamiliarizes people and places we thought we knew. You could describe it as a kind of possession. Fiction gives us not only access to but ownership of experiences not our own, even as it casts a kind of spell over us, drawing us out of where we are. Rosanna Warren describes it this way in her autobiographical essay “Midi”: “To read is to take possession. But it is also to give oneself completely, if temporarily, to the keeping of another mind, and to enter another world.”

For me as a young reader, that other world had two favorite regions I loved to explore – history, which seemed like a fabulous and richly peopled country, and sports, that fiercely competitive terrain where people from nowhere could make good. Since I was from nowhere too, a bright, ghetto-bred yeshiva boy, son of Americanized immigrants, it gave me bold figures with whom I could identify. I was particularly taken with a series of eight young adult novels by Joseph Altsheler about the Civil War, focused alternately on two cousins, close to each other before the war, who find themselves fighting on opposite sides. These books turned a divided family into a metaphor for a fractured nation pursuing a fratricidal war. First published during the first world war – Altsheler died in 1919 – they focused on major battles and had similar titles – The Guns of Bull Run, The Sword of Antietam, The Rock of Chicamauga – place names that were exotic, hard to pronounce, yet meant America to me, the real America as opposed to New York Jewish world I knew best.

We didn’t buy books in my family and there were only a few stray titles on the shelves; instead I haunted the local public library – the Seward Park branch on the Lower East Side, which survives today, a detached relic among large housing projects. I can still picture the exact spot on the shelf where these treasured books were to be found. I learned what little I knew about American history from these novels, where our worst national bloodletting came alive as a saga of broken ties and youthful adventures. Eager for tales of heroism and military campaigns, I was enchanted by the ground’s-eye view of colorful generals like Stonewall Jackson but also by the simple fact of young men leaving home and getting caught up in a critical turn of the nation’s history.

My other favorite was the sports novels of John R. Tunis, such as The Kid from Tomkinsville, about a rookie pitcher, a small-town kid, trying to make it with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It must have mattered that I had little athletic grace of my own, but hungered for it. As an ardent Yankee fan I was hardly disposed to like the Dodgers, their perennial, hapless hometown rival, but here was another tale of a young man setting out in the world, against humbling odds, to seek glory with a team itself the chronic underdog. The resulting teamwork and unlikely stardom were irresistible to me, besides offering privileged access to the baseball scene I already followed with passion. The rivalries of sports, the dreams and crotchets of its players, were as momentous to me then as the drums of war. Both catered to a boy’s fantasy of winning recognition, distinguishing yourself through luck and pluck – a dream of standing out just by being really good at what you did.

But something just as fundamental must have been at work, a sheer love of story, an bedrock fascination with what happens next. This was as potent for me in settings of everyday life as well as in heart stopping scenes of conflict or adventure. This may be why I gulped down Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with such gusto. Mark Twain called them both “adventures” but they were really postwar memories of a simpler life, the lives of boys in border country before the Civil War. I picked up few of the deeper resonances of Huckleberry Finn, which I read simply as an engrossing continuation of the story, but the Mississippi River surroundings were as winningly remote to me as the India of Kipling’s Kim, another book about the perils and freedoms of a boy on his own that I wolfed down soon afterward. I basked in the unfamiliar world of these books as much as the stories they told. To recapture the pleasure I found in the Twain diptych I fell upon Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and its nifty sequel, Penrod and Sam, published around the same time as the Altsheler books. Like Twain’s novels but with a more literary vocabulary, a surprisingly arch style, they were about youthful misadventures, not real adventures. Since I was too much the ‘good’ boy, driven to perform and excel, the devil-may-care behavior of these boys, always getting into fixes, spoke loudly to my furtive, hidden impulse to misbehave. They let me savor the anarchic role of the boy I could never be, for I was eager to please, deeply invested in winning adult approval.

My craving for story came out even more in my love of movies, just about any movies so long as there were vivid figures on the screen and something happened to them. I never tired of the double bills at neighbor hood theatres, the B-film programmers as much as the features, and I once announced exultantly that I had never seen a film that wasn’t absolutely great – not an auspicious omen for a future critic. Soon I realized that richly woven storytelling was the web and woof of most fictional best sellers. Barely into high school, I began devouring as many popular books as I could lay my hands on, pillaging the local library after we had moved to Queens, eyeing the Locked Shelf where the racier titles were kept. The library was my second home on Saturday afternoons when observant Jews did little but sleep, read, or take long walks. For pennies a day I also borrowed books from the tiny lending library – was it Womrath’s? – that stocked recent titles in local drug stores. Branching out even further, I snagged free books for joining the Literary Guild, which featured novels that were all plot, all action, some steamily romantic in the style of Daphne du Maurier, some simply evocative and atmospheric like Island in the Sun, set in the Caribbean, by Evelyn Waugh’s less gifted older brother, Alec, who was also a travel writer. I joined the egregious Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club where each volume boiled down four or five popular books into pure story, excising literary frills like subplots, digressions, and detailed descriptions.

Such surgical shortcuts were handy for a pedantically slow reader, as I then was, who relished every sentence yet also needed the feeling of keeping up, of being in the know. This is the truncated form in which I ‘read’ books like Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, which sported Jewish characters who were closer to home than anything I expected to find in popular fiction. Such plot-driven novels were written efficiently in prose as transparent as Orwell’s windowpane, with few turns of style that could impede the flow of the telling or complicate the human relationships. But just then, as a high school sophomore, I stumbled on two novels that unexpectedly gave me a finer sense of where fiction could transport the reader.

The first was Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which propelled me breathlessly into the maelstrom of the French Revolution, a scene I had already encountered in the derring-do of a royalist thriller, The Scarlet Pimpernel. I was swept up by the larger-than-life quality of Dickens’s world of bloody carnage and social enmity, and by the sheer intensity of his themes of injustice, redemption, and self-sacrifice. Who could forget the famous opening (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ”), the lethal knitting of the vengeful Madame Defarge, or the final speech by the wastrel Sydney Carton as he goes to the guillotine in place of a better man (“It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have even done . . . “)? But what impressed me most was the sinuous complication of Dickens’s sentences, with their elaborate dependent clauses, and the braided strands of his labyrinthine plot, its vast web of memorable characters. This dense plotting, with every loose thread tied up by the end, seemed such a perfect wonder that I began rereading the book as soon as I finished it, as if to unlock the secret of how it was constructed.

The other eye-opening work I came upon, this one for a book report, was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This too had a distant historical milieu, even more remote than the Civil War, all laid out in finely wrought sentences that bent my mind at unexpected angles. The lone figure of Hester Prynne, cast out of the community, bearing her badge of shame with defiant pride, reverberated for me, since I was already in adolescent rebellion against my strict religious upbringing. Once desperate to belong, I was now drawn to characters who resisted and went their own way. Above all these novels by Dickens and Hawthorne showed me the difference literary form could make, how deep language could plumb. For the first time I felt the spell not only of what the books were about, the elaborately imagined worlds they opened to me, but also the way they were written, their intricate embroidery of words and themes.

This dawning appreciation of language itself eventually led me to the work of Conrad and Joyce, whose work I happened upon shortly before my freshman year in college. A commodious collection of Conrad’s stories and short novels, Tales of Land and Sea, became my new bible, burnished by miracles of style that lent eloquence to adventures more subtle than anything I had read. My other new find was Harry Levin’s Portable Joyce, collecting all his early work in a beautifully printed format. A neighbor in the dorms, also a future English major, had come upon these two writers at just the same time, and we fell into a pattern of reading their stories in tandem, then chewing them over one by one.

It struck me that one of the serious pleasures of reading novels – or seeing movies – was talking about them afterward, turning the experience around in the mind and on the tongue. I was nowhere near ready to take on their big books, Nostromo or Ulysses, partly because I was still a pokey, masticating reader, but the mandarin prose, far-off milieu, and keen moral dilemmas of Conrad’s tales spoke to my undergraduate thirst for large existential questions. But where Conrad’s language, so tactile, so visual, enthralled me for being really written – it was anything but a transparent windowpane – Joyce’s writing in Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist looked understated, drab, as if reflecting his characters’ lives. Nothing much happened in his stories – the reign of plot seemed to have ended – yet I got the keen sense of an everyday world, itself grey and uneventful, utterly different from my own Jewish world, yet seen only through fugitive glimpses from story to story .

In Joyce’s shabby-genteel world, suffocating in middle-class propriety, much of the upholstery of fiction had vanished along with the neat plotting, the satisfying curve of storytelling. As a reader I would need to connect the dots, to line up the moments of insight on my own. This was my halting introduction to modern art, as I realized much later. If Dickens’s novel had amazed me with its ingenious architecture and Conrad’s prose for its gravity and plenitude, Joyce’s stories struck me most for their seemingly casual indirection. Their revelations were oblique, at times almost imperceptible. These final epiphanies, as Joyce liked to call them, were nothing like the twisty O. Henry endings I had come to expect from short stories.

One quite different book had somewhat prepared me for the uncanny quality of Joyce’s short fiction. In the local library I had come across a Kafka collection, The Penal Colony, which stitched together the meager volumes he’d brought out in his own lifetime. The earliest stories, mere sketches, didn’t register for me, but those that followed mesmerized me with their strangeness and open-endedness. They fleshed out fantastic stories with realistic detail but I had no idea what they were meant to be about. One story, barely a page or two, dealt with a provincial advocate who had once been Bucephalus, the noble steed ridden by Alexander the Great. Now he was settling down to a more humdrum life, nothing like his ancient days of glory. Another was about a country doctor who rides out for a nighttime call, finds himself abused and jeered at, only to realize he can never return – his life is changed forever. The story unfolded with a dreamlike logic that made it feel at once enigmatic and inevitable. But even at seventeen I could identify with its emotions of infinite regret and infinite longing, the dread sense of having made a wrong turn, done something trivial but fateful that could never be undone.

As I grew more intrigued with short fiction I decided to try writing some myself. Creative writing was not on the bill in Columbia College – a craft approach to the arts was frowned upon, on the notion that real art couldn’t be taught – so I signed on to a course in the School of General Studies with a veteran writing teacher. There was too much talk about tricks of the trade, about formulas for writing and getting published, but I was grateful for the incentive simply to write. For weeks and weeks I wrestled with turning stuff I remembered or invented into genuine stories but they never seemed to come together. It was easy to set the scene, much harder to keep things moving convincingly, let alone to find the right resolution – half a story was no trouble to write. From my discovery of touching collections by Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrel) and Grace Paley (The Little Disturbances of Man) I already knew that Jewish lives, the folks who inhabited the world I knew best, could be material for fiction. But I had such a mystique of the creative, of Art with a capital A, that my small experience seemed too beggarly, too banal, for the exalted demands of authentic fiction. The writers I read and revered had left me awed, tongue-tied. Finally, at the last possible moment, I dropped the course. I despaired of being able to cast a spell, conjure up a world that would truly come alive, take hold of a reader, as my idols had done. My life in fiction was going to be in the fiction I read, not in the fiction I wrote, though I never quite surrendered the ambition of writing a novel.

As a college junior I had my first extended exposure to modern literature in a large lecture course given by Lionel Trilling. To my surprise I liked Ulysses less than Joyce’s earlier books, though Trilling wisely urged us to speed through it at the pace of an ordinary novel, without pausing to decipher every page, every phrase. But I took to everything of Kafka’s I could put my hands on: “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” The Castle, The Trial. Something about his work simply transfixed me I couldn’t explain it. There was nothing overtly Jewish about it, but it spoke to the imagination of disaster I must have imbibed from my immigrant parents, who evidently felt that if something could go wrong it inevitably would – a cold might develop into pneumonia, a bike ride was an invitation to an accident, a knock at the door could bring grief or bad trouble. These dark expectations, so often disappointed, were choice material for comedy, and I came to see Kafka as a poker-faced comic writer, at once excavating and exorcizing his own unhappy consciousness. Though I had never been unhappy in that radical way, I had such dismal intuitions in my bones.

This was the moment in one’s reading life when the mind was like virgin soil, when every seed sprouted, and each year, seemingly each week, brought fresh discoveries. In my senior year it was the landmark works of nineteenth-century fiction, first Jane Austen and Walter Scott, then Victorian fiction, which I studied with Trilling, Steven Marcus, and Daniel Bell in a newly conceived course on the Victorian “moral temper,” by which they meant the core values, the inner rhythm of the culture. Their aim was for us to pluck social insight from these novelists, especially Dickens and Trollope, to grasp key institutions like the church and the political system. But what we found in them instead was the exuberant vitality of a richly peopled world, something no sociology or professional history could furnish. It was no accident that these long books were works you could truly live in, self-contained, copiously imagined worlds. I developed a passion for such expansive works. I won’t go into the delectable summers spent with The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, The Way We Live Now, or Middlemarch, books I hoped would never end, which actually felt like they would never end.

The following year, as a graduate student at Yale, I had my first serious run-in with classic American literature, since The Scarlet Letter had not led me to try out other American books, which were patronized as slightly provincial in the precincts of Columbia’s English Department. To fill this gap in my reading, I burrowed my way through Melville, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, whose books were so idiosyncratic they linked up better with modern writers than with the English tradition. Hawthorne’s austere moral allegories and Poe’s horrific stories reminded me of Kafka, while Melville reawakened my dormant feeling for Conrad. But that yearlong course, taught by Charles Feidelson, concluded with a full semester on Henry James that provided me with literary capital for a lifetime. I cherish a clear memory of every book and story I read in that class, from Roderick Hudson to The Golden Bowl, and of wrestling with a paper on The Portrait of a Lady that was perhaps the high-water mark of my life as a student. It showed me how well fiction could track the delicate operations of perception, the mind on which nothing is lost, but also the social features of classes and intimate relationships, all bottomless in their complexity.

But the best thing about this trek through James was probing the work of a many-sided writer from beginning to end, getting inside his imagination as it worked out its destiny from book to book. Two years earlier I had had the great fortune of spending a full year with Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays; two years later, on a fellowship in Cambridge, I would do so again with most of the novels of Dickens. Henry James was not quite in their league but his work too had the copious variety of a universe as it deepened from decade to decade. You could not really settle down in his world, as you could in the Dickens world, but you had to be amazed at how he explored the filaments of human consciousness, beginning with Isabel Archer’s great fireside reverie, three-quarters of the way though The Portrait of a Lady, when she grasps at last the grim reality of her unfortunate marriage. In his insight into such relationships, the bachelor James had picked up where Jane Austen and George Eliot had left off. This was what F. R. Leavis hailed as the “great tradition.”

I won’t go into my later adventures with metafiction in the late 1960s, when I discovered Pynchon and Borges and Barthelme; with American Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Philip Roth, with neo-realist writers like Carver and Ford; or with American writers of the interwar years, whose work I began to teach in courses that were part literary and part cultural history – the life and times as seen from inside the novelist’s imagination. Suffice it to say that I learned the wisdom of Henry James’s metaphor of the house of fiction, with its many rooms. For Borges and Kafka those rooms form part of a labyrinth, like Kafka’s Castle or his edifice of the Law, structures with no real apertures. For James they have windows into which we can peer, to slake our unquenchable curiosity about how different people live and feel – “not one window,” says James in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, “but a million . . . every one of which has been pierced, or is still piercable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.”

Thanks to these windows, behind which so many telling scenes are enacted, fiction has given me access to more people and places than ‘real’ life has ever done, access so vibrant that it belongs less to mere observation, more to the fullness of experience itself. My wife once complained when I was reading a Trollope novel that I was unreachable – “earth to dad,” the kids used to say, trying to snag their father’s attention. Glassy-eyed, I was living vicariously in that imagined world even when I was not actually reading. Not all novels offer us such an ample, enveloping reality, a sorcerer’s web of words that possesses us completely, with the very alchemy that eluded me in the stories I tried to write. All of them, when they work, take us out of ourselves, even as they drive us into ourselves, tapping into feelings we never knew we had, constructing a world more purified of circumstance and accident than the mundane world we think we know. As Keats put it in one of his inimitable letters, “the imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.”

From the Mailer Review, Fall 2012:

[Going through my papers recently I came across the carbon of a letter nominating Norman Mailer for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It probably dates from around 1980 since it refers to The Executioner’s Song as recently published. The PEN American Center no doubt solicited nominations and this was my response. The occasion seemed to demand an exhaustive C.V., a condensed catalogue raisonée, but even in this pedantic format I notice a few  phrases I’m moderately pleased to have written, since they evoke his talent in ways I had forgotten. The reference to André Gide particularly surprised me. Of course Mailer was not the only perpetual nominee never to be awarded the Nobel Prize. On this distinguished list he joins writers from Tolstoy and Proust to Graham Greene, Nabokov, and (so far) Philip Roth, some of them blocked by the dogged opposition of a single figure on the committee, others by their presumed failure to be sufficiently upbeat and life-enhancing, as the terms of the bequest officially demand.  -M.D.]     

Norman Mailer was born in 1923, attended Harvard University, from which he was graduated in 1943, served with the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater in World War II, and returned to write what is still considered one of the best of all American war novels, The Naked and the Dead (1948).  Yet Mailer was not content to continue writing in the naturalistic vein of this first novel. One of the hallmarks of his career is his shifts of style and ambition from book to book. His second and third novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), remain impressive experiments in allegorical and political writing, especially where they touch on sexual themes. During this period Mailer wrote two of the best American short stories, “The Man Who Studied Yoga” and “The Time of Her Time,” and began a truly extraordinary career as a writer of nonfiction and journalism with “The White Negro” (1957), later collected with his other shorter writings in Advertisements for Myself (1959). Interlaced with a remarkable autobiographical commentary, these writings were truly prophetic and helped usher in the drastic changes in American culture in the 1960s, with their new interest in politics, their fascination with Beat and bohemian countercultures, and their advanced treatment of sex, which was radically new for the still-Puritan American culture of the period.

In 1960 Mailer the journalist, yet in full command of his novelistic skills, wrote the first of a series of reports on American conventions [and] their political personalities, especially the American presidents. These political writings were collected in The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), and St. George and the Godfather (1972). Meanwhile Mailer returned to fiction with what may be his best and most original novel, An American Dream (1965), and Why Are We in Vietnam (1967). During this period he also directed three films and gave a new turn to his career with The Armies of the Night (1968), a report on the American antiwar movement which also is the keenest account of a whole generation and a whole turbulent decade in American culture. In books like this Mailer helped invent the nonfiction novel, and pioneered the introduction of novelistic devices and a subjective persona into journalism.

All this was done in style that remains one of the most eloquent, elaborate, and controlled in modern American writing. Not only does Mailer love language and play it as a musical instrument, but he epitomizes the writer as existentialist, trying on new styles, risking new projects, undertaking new adventures in every work. Yet his enormous body of work in many genres forms a roman fleuve of continuous though fragmentary autobiography. No writer since Gide has written so obsessively about himself, yet managed to make himself so interesting to other people. Yet for all his introspection Mailer is continuously fascinated with the public world and the nature of power. He writes about politics with humane sensitivity yet acute insight.

Only recently, in 1979, Mailer, who seemed to have completely exhausted the vein of nonfiction, took an entirely different turn and produced yet another unexpected masterpiece. In The Executioner’s Song (1979), an enormous roman-vérité about a condemned killer, Mailer kept himself scrupulously out of the picture. Instead he gave an unforgettable picture of the American West with its vast spaces and drifting, dissociated people; this is the best book yet produced in the whole genre of the nonfiction novel. These are ordinary people whose lives are scarcely serious enough for quality fiction but Mailer makes us care about them in the course of the book. The Executioner’s Song confirms the gargantuan size of Mailer’s talent, its variety and unpredictability, and adds measurably to the already large body of his work. At present he is the American writer most deserving of the Nobel Prize.