#8: motes in the middle distance
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the eighth one.
Boredom. My commute starts again in earnest in a matter of days. I should have been enjoying and focusing all my attention on not driving all summer—but maybe that could have ruined it, because then I would have been thinking about driving. I wrote this poem about my commute. It took me all of Spring semester, from January to May, to write; in my car, I kept a running list of all the graveyards I could see.
Horror. Earlier this summer I spent a couple weeks binge-reading David Lodge novels, which I find dazzling in their ability to express high theory in plain language and therapeutic in their rueful yet frank descriptions of the human cost of academic budget cuts. But as I read, the sense that these books were sexist was running alongside, and messing with, my enjoyment. A woman does not exist in Nice Work, Small World, Thinks… etc. etc. etc. who isn’t sexualized by men. It may sound weird to talk about seriousness here, because Lodge’s campus novels are satirical and sometimes cartoonish, but his men are serious and his women aren’t. Even when Lodge writes from a woman’s perspective, he doesn’t give his women the ability to sexualize men the way his men sexualize women—and so while his men are motivated by sex and death, the choices his women make are capricious, mysterious, confusing. But still, because I was hypnotized by the theory and budget cut stuff, I kept going. Then I got to Changing Places (which is the first one—I was reading them with such zeal that I didn’t even care or notice that I was going out of order), and I stopped. I appreciate Lodge, I believe he’s some kind of theory wizard and if I teach poststructuralism again I’ll probably assign his excellent theory books and parts of Nice Work, but I hate Changing Places. The concept of the novel is that American professor Morris Zapp swaps positions with button-downed British professor Philip Swallow for a semester. I stopped reading after the scene with Zapp on the plane to the University of Rummidge. The humor here (pre Roe v. Wade) is based around the concept that it’s an abortion plane, so everyone onboard is going to England, where abortions are legal. The women on the plane are not people to the same extent that Zapp is. They are not trustworthy, their choices, grief, confusion, and pain are muffled, boring, beside the point. If their situation is horrible or humorous or anything at all, it only has interest to the extent that it reaches the higher human plane, with its attendant humor, on which Zapp exists. It’s humor, but it’s not funny at all, and it’s strange to me that the sexism in these books isn’t discussed more often. On second thought, I’m not going to assign my students Nice Work or excerpts from his theory books. As theory tells us, ideology is everywhere, always part of the message. Why would I promote and spread an ideology like that?
Glory. Some time last year, I agreed to write an encyclopedia entry about Cynthia Ozick, in part because it wasn’t due until December 1, 2019, which sounded like it was never going to come. Now it seems more likely to come than not, and I need to read every single book Ozick has ever written and write about them. I feel an affinity for Ozick because of her cute haircut, which vaguely reminds me of the haircut my beautiful grandma had. Also, I wrote an article partially about Cynthia Ozick, but it was really much more about Henry James. Now I’m also regretting that article and the haircut judgment, because they directly led this encyclopedia entry. As I delve into Ozick’s oeuvre, I am learning that I don’t like her very much. I may change my mind—and the problem could be that I started with her nonfiction; what she pointedly calls “literary essays,” to contrast with the “perfervid and constantly evanescing succession of rapidly outmoded theoretical movements” by which English professors thrive.
Notions of immortality and fame, and—especially—the idea of enduring as a writer haunt these essays. Ozick has multiple essays (“The Novel or Nothing: Lionel Trilling” and “Lionel Trilling and the Buried Life”) about how everybody’s forgotten Lionel Trilling, and how he tried and failed to write a novel. This seems to me like an ungenerous and inaccurate reading not only of Trilling but of the role of the critic. As T.S. Eliot says, every generation needs its own critics to interpret literature of the past and present for contemporary readers. The avenue Trilling was traveling did not lead to what Ozick calls “lastingness” for his own name; it was more like he was offering readers of his time a way of approaching texts of all kinds, from politics to novels to the history of liberal criticism. What I see as his legacy is very hard to square with the loser Ozick describes.
I’ve noticed that one of Ozick’s go-to moves, across the three works of nonfiction I’ve read so far, is to list lots of writers who very recently were popular, but who now are “forgotten.” And she’s very quick to declare a writer forgotten. In “Writers, Visible and Invisible,” she says, “Already Norman Mailer is a distant unregretted noise, and William Styron a mote in the middle distance (a phrase the nearly forgotten Max Beerbohm applied to the fading Henry James).” I don’t think there’s a single word in this sentence that I agree with. Just to skim the surface, I don’t understand what “unregretted” means here. And Max Beerbohm did not call James a mote in the middle distance; he wrote a parody of Late James titled “A Mote in the Middle Distance,” which, if anything, helped popularize and publicize a “lasting” collective reading of James in all his brilliance, absurdity, and impenetrability. She goes on: “As for poor befuddled mystical Jack Kerouac and declamatory fiddle-strumming mystical Allen Ginsberg, both are diminished to Documents of an Era: the stale turf of social historians and excitable professors of cultural studies.” She hates “professors of cultural studies.”
In an essay titled “The Lastingness of Saul Bellow,” Ozick lists 31 writers who Bellow corresponded with, all of whom, she says, have entered “oblivion”: who is reading any of these people now? she asks, “apart from some professorial specialist currying his ‘field.’” Her list of these sorry writers is too long to include here, but it features our poor old friends Mailer, Trilling, and Ginsberg, plus Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Grace Paley, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton. I don’t know what “lastingness” means to Ozick, why Bellow has it and Mailer, McCarthy, or Sexton don’t. It’s like some idea of ultimate glory that is completely personal to her, but that is never described in any of these essays.
In “Writers, Visible and Invisible,” she writes, “Fame merits its capital F for its fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.” But Ozick’s own essays about writers, and her own career (and, okay, also my own observations), show me otherwise: how fickle cultural constructions of “Literature” are, and how unlasting! Do I feel this way about these essays because I’m one of her dreaded English professors? I hope not. And as I get to the nonfiction yet to go and start on her fiction, I’m going to try my very best to keep an open mind. As always, I’ll keep you updated.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Oops, I didn’t say anything positive in this whole newsletter. I did a recommended reading list for Poetry this month, and you can find it here (you have to scroll down a bit to get to mine) and I recommended excellent books and other things.
Unrecommended: The Din in the Head, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Quarrel & Quandry, Cynthia Ozick; Changing Places, David Lodge