Orphans

Tom has just begun reading Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Gosse was one of the important late Victorian literary critics – he wrote a general history of English literature, several large volumes, a very useful book. Father and Son is his autobiography, or at least part of his life story. Gosse’s parents were members of the last generation of real Puritans; their dogged questioning of Anglicanism led them deeper into dissent until they settled in an odd little church called the Plymouth Brethren, Biblical literalists. The newly married couple’s favorite shared pastime was trying to make sense of the Book of Revelations.

Mencken definition of Puritanism sticks with us to this day (thanks, Leslie), and the label has stuck, truthfully enough. But the American Fundamentalist is like a cheap degraded imitation of his real Puritan forebears. He’s like Las Vegas souvenir keychain Elvis compared to actual Elvis, as you may infer from the cheap and specious reasoning in the article Leslie cites. You can glimpse the real Puritans in accounts of the Counter-Reformation; they are all over England in the 17th century. You can see their later descendants in the New England of P.T. Barnum’s childhood. And one quality that is totally unexpected among them is joy. Gosse’s parents had that quality, even though the early years of their marriage were difficult, and just as things were beginning to get easy Emily Gosse, Edmund's mother, was diagnosed with breast cancer, for which there was no treatment at the time. The Gosses practiced, joyfully, a most scrupulous unworldliness. They did their bit of the world’s work and they read the Bible and they enjoyed this blessed assurance that came with a complete and willing trust in and submission to the mystery of God’s will. These were not the sort of people who think God gets them Oscars or wins football games for them. They were kooks but it is impossible not to admire them. They were truly heroic people.

To top off everything, Gosse’s father was a zoologist, a real lover of science, enjoying good professional relations with, of all people, Darwin and Lyell. Philip Henry Gosse’s fame peaked in the years when biology and geology were converging to reveal 1) a longer timeline of earth’s history than the Biblical timeline, and 2) the changeability of species. Zoology was the bit of the world’s work that the elder Gosse did, and he loved it. You knew the moment had to come sooner or later, the moment when irrefutable biological fact and Biblical inerrancy met. Gosse pere tried to reconcile both in a hpothesis that was so silly, especially coming from a man of his intelligence and knowledge, that it made him a laughing-stock, the great humiliation of his life. His theory, roughly put, was that God had planted misleading geological evidence for evolution as a test of faith. I am sure there are people who believe this now, but his contemporary Victorian audience knew that this was just ludicrous.

He couldn’t follow biological theory where it was going, though he was able to go on doing a lot of zoological work; locating and identifying and classifying new species of tide-pool creatures. He was a bit of a tide-pool creature himself. It was the loss to the field of a wonderfully trained mind. A tragedy with just that little bit of farce to it that makes you forgive human frailty.

But the story of this controversy is only an incident in Edmund Gosse’s narrative. The book is really about what it was like to grow up with these peculiar people.

Gosse’s mother was a writer of devotional poetry. She had her son quite late in life, especially for those days, and died of breast cancer when he was eight. In the years after her diagnosis, as she traveled about London seeking treatment and often in terrible pain, she became a great harvester of souls, converting people she met on the street by the force of her arguments and her formidable will power. She was the great moral force of the little household, and on her deathbed she made her husband promise to dedicate their son to God’s service, that is, to teach him to become the kind of servant of God that they were, to carry their mission further.

The story of Gosse’s childhood and adolescence is the story of how he found his way out from under this dreadful obligation.

Gosse is little regarded now as a critic because the thing that interested him in literature was its pleasure, the pleasure of beautiful language and feeling. This was a luxury that the English and American modernist writers, looking at the shambles of Europe after World War I, felt was rather less than indispensable. But the world into which Gosse escaped from the Plymouth Brethren was the fullest flowering of Victorian culture, buoyant, optimistic, rich, busy, and serious about things like pleasure and beauty, And, oddly, his upbringing peculiarly fitted him for responsiveness to literary pleasure. He clearly started out with that sensitivity – he detested bad writing as soon as he could read – but the long daily Bible readings had the effect of steeping his imagination in the language of the King James Bible. But there was another, salutary effect; close attention, and the absence of self-sufficiency, by which I mean the absence of the starting assumption that he knew it all already. He was a man who had broken a sacred deathbed promise to his mother and escaped into a secular world of which he knew little.

I had a friend years ago (we’ve lost touch) who was an ex-Muslim. He had turned to Marxism, of all things! We used to have long arguments, usually in bars. He was bitter, and I don’t believe in bitterness, I don’t believe that a general pose of cynicism does anything except let the real bastards steal the good things of the world right out from under you while you are admiring your own superiority. His cynicism was cover, too, for a lot of pain that he wouldn’t own up to. One night I got really exasperated with him. I said “You’ve gone from being a true believer in one book to being a true believer in another book. There’s no difference. Maybe the problem you have is that you keep thinking you can get everything out of one book.”

Gosse escaped this hazard; he was moved by the Word, and he learned early that it was because he was moved by words. When he eventually discovered literature (all works of fiction were forbidden) he found a garden of earthly delights which those passionate, enthusiastic, analytical Bible readings had strangely fitted him to enjoy. His quite voluminous body of criticism is testament to this enjoyment. But in Father and Son it seems to me that any reader should pay close attention to what he says about books. Because he is not putting anything on, he is not trying to impress anybody with cleverness.

A book like this only gets written because it tells the story of the defining experience of a person’s life. The story demands to be told, as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner demands to be told.

Nothing in this book is quite what you would expect, and that’s a good thing. There are undoubtedly reticences – he was a Victorian, for crying out loud! – but what he does tell you is so strange that it reminds me of how sketchy and cartoonish my usual ideas about things are. It reminds me how I go about my day vaguely feeling that I know about the world, unreflecting, navigating it by means of conventional ideas that I don’t examine unless I bump into something that demands closer attention. Everything that disturbs our sense of knowing it all, our sense that we know the exact price of all the goods in the shop, is salutary. In taking in the basic facts of Gosse’s life we may think we know all about him, but what we are taking for knowledge is not to be confused with what we get byexperience.

In this book I enter a world that was culturally remote even from the society that was contemporary to it. How much more remote it must be from me here today! And yet when I read it I feel like I am not escaping, but getting deeper look into, my own world. We need our sense of what it is to experience anything to be continually refreshed. Life is short, there’s too much to do, and our faculty of stereotyping and working from sketchy views of relationships and things is necessary just to get through the day. But when we look into our own relationships to things, when we want to know what we can know, when we hope to judge and act from the best motives, we have to stretch our imagination and sympathies to their outermost reach. We can’t just go looking for what we already know.

With this thought I've been compiling a list of writers, like Gosse, whose works you might pass on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore without realizing that they are worth picking up. I'll post it separately.

Richard Schickel Farts In Your General Direction

I vaguely recall some commentary here and there a couple of weeks ago about the decline of the newspaper book review. The National Book Critics’ Circle is trying to save the Book Review section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Naturally enough, book reviewers are also on the case.

I want to save the newspaper book review, as well. I am all for anything that puts dollars in the pocket of a hungry literary scribe. And I also favor the dissemination of new ideas and of new books, and I’m pro-critic, too. I am a critic. I’ve written book reviews for newspapers, for actual cash dollars. But I haven’t written a book review for money in about two years. Mainly for lack of trying. And for years, I taught people to write and to read literature. Published a book of original literary criticism that was not widely praised, but praised in very good places. Small and select again, like you, my dear readers.

But I’m just a blogger now. I am not one of the Lord’s Anointed. I unanointed myself when I created my Blogger account and now I am one of the shaggy hordes threatening the citadel of Richard Schickel’s mind newspaper book reviewing.

Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.

And great wailing and lamentation was heard in the citadel, for Auto Parts Guy was seen crossing the plain where the invading armies had pitched their tents…”

Schickel was apparently unaware, until the terrifying figure of Auto Parts Guy filled the sky and blotted out the sun, that “anyone can comment on books.”

Anyone? Did I read that right?

Even now, he has trouble believing it. Do you believe it? Well, look at the consequences. Auto Parts Guy.

He acknowledges (and I won’t quarrel with him on this) that most newspaper book reviewing is hackery. He knows this because all sorts of riff-raff have been able to review his books – with spray paint. Well that’s democratic. And if it’s not democratic enough for you? Well, I suppose you’ll think it’s just dandy when Auto Parts Guy comes and kicks your front door in and – something cataclysmic and awful -- wants to swim in your community pool maybe. Booooo!!! Auto Parts Guy!! The thing is pellucidly clear, as West Indian lawyers like to say.

One hesitates to make Schickel even more frantically irritated than he already seems to be, but perhaps it should be gently pointed out to him that people have always been free to comment on books. No one has to prove they have a right to an opinion. Not even Auto Parts Guy. I would recommend Schickel read Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He will find plenty of evidence there. Only one of the speakers in all of those conversations is a literary critic, one of the greatest literary critics of all time, in fact. And yet all sorts of people are venturing to express their own opinions to him. About books, politics, morals, all kinds of things. Bloggers don’t even need to assert their right to an opinion. It’s given. We aren’t all necessarily entitled to agreement or even interest from others, however. That we have to earn. And how will we know if we’ve earned it if we don’t put it out there? Does Schickel ever talk to anybody?

To be fair, from where Schickel sits it must look like a bunch of scabs are moving in to take over his job. I hear the lament of the skilled and valued worker who fears he is about to become obsolete. I don’t want book reviewers to become obsolete; I want there to be more to read in the newspaper, not less.

It isn’t bloggers who are threatening his job. They may be threatening his status, but his status is totally bogus anyway. He never had such status, and bloggers have not changed it.

I don’t know what Schickel’s credentials are but he doesn’t seem to be doing much with them. This is a slovenly and incoherent piece of writing. He brings in Sainte-Beuve (“not a name much bruited in the blogosphere,” he sneers, failing to notice that it’s not a name much bruited in newspapers or, for that matter, even Time magazine, either). What he says about Orwell is not relevant to the point at issue (but it is the one Orwell reference that newspaper people, for reasons that elude me, love to invoke), and he simply asserts (violating his own strictures against “idle opinion-mongering”) that Edmund Wilson was the “the best book reviewer this country ever had.” “Thumbs up!”

He seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that it is his job to tell posterity what to think of books. He imagines he is maintaining some sort of standard of judgment. On the basis of what evidence I simply do not know.

At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, there was a fascinating panel featuring writers whose books were written in what time they could spare from their day jobs. Inevitably, blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn't take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).

D.J. Waldie, among the finest of our part-time scriveners, in effect said "fine." But remember, he added, blogging is a form of speech, not of writing.

I thought it was a wonderful point. The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.

I don’t know, there’s something so perverse about me. When I read a passage like that last paragraph there my mind immediately goes to these written things that don’t impose any sense of responsibility at all: “The Imperfect Enjoyment”; Ben Jonson’s journey down the Thames; Dryden’s incredibly scurrilous pamphlets; James Joyce’s raunchy letters to his wife Nora; the Dunciad; Boswell’s journals; well, you get the idea. I mean, if you look at books they don’t act like this, there are so many layers of assumption with no reference to evidence in books. And there is no evidence presented to support any of his statements about blogs, either. Just Auto Parts Guy! Scary Scary Auto Parts Guy!

But it never worked like that. Schickel is just as entitled to his opinion as everyone else. But to get an audience to trust that opinion, his credential won’t help, his status won’t help, nothing but writing intelligent criticism will help. The one person who actually does have an obligation to prove anything to anybody in this scenario is Schickel. How’s that for irony? That is how it has always been.

It doesn’t occur to him that the bloggers who write about books, the ones he dismisses as doing no more than “finger painting” are his readers; a person who is interested enough to write book reviews reads book reviews. These are the people that he is treating with such bilious contempt. The critic is not the only person who judges. His readers judge him. They make snap judgments about him, just as they do about everything else that appears in the newspaper – everything under the sun. His credentials don’t protect him from those kinds of judgments. They will read him, and if they don’t think he’s interesting, or if they don’t feel they can trust him, they’ll move on. And this is, again, something that Schickel doesn’t seem to know.

Or maybe he does know and imagines that his position on a newspaper is like that of a preacher in a pulpit: a license to preach at the audience and not have to put up with any lip, and enjoyment of the delusion that any of this enforceable without the consent of the governed so to speak. Naturally a person who puts himself in that position is prone to think himself or herself specially ordained and anointed and entitled to have readers who know how to behave themselves.

And all three wrote for intelligent readers who emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind. We do not — maybe I ought to make that "should not" — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

Orwell, Wilson, and Sainte-Beuve had readers who were grateful for book reviews, you sharper-than-a-serpent’s-tooth readers, you! What does Schickel get? He leaves you alone in the house for a couple hours and you invite all these yahoos in here and they drink up all the good booze and trash the place– you let Auto Parts Guy in here! Which bathroom did he use?

And what do you think of a writer who has such contempt for his own audience? For the people (other than his book publishers) who care most about what he writes in his book reviews? For the people who would most likely join him to save the book review? For the people least responsible for the predicament in which the newspaper book reviewer finds himself? But he farts in your general direction anyway, because, well, Auto Parts Guy! I mean, Auto Parts Guy!

Bloggers, and readers, are the last people to blame for this predicament. Newspaper management at the corporate level has a lot of the responsibility; editors have some of the responsibility; the book reviewers have responsibility. The LA Times Book Review has been dull for going on 30 years, and they have responded by doing just about everything possible except making it interesting. I don’t say nothing interesting ever appears, but considering the writing talent, and the reading talent, that gathers in the entertainment industry, why are their reviewers so uninspired? It is possible to write about books in a way that itself gives pleasure. But you can’t get there by starting out with contempt for your reader.

Now that I've fallen off the edge of the earth, no one has to come back here to read what I write or what Jeff writes if they don't find it interesting. I don't have the mighty clout of the LA Times at my back. And all my credentials will not help me if I'm not honest or interesting. An academic imprimatur would add prestige, but not necessarily intellectual value, to whatever I write here. I'm working without a net. So is is everybody else. Schickel, too.

Update: Tidied this up a bit. That's what comes of blogging in the wee small hours of the morning.