Category: Books

“A typical case of a small-town boy who betrayed his roots”: David Foster Wallace as a Midwestern writer

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Chicago Reader]

In this week’s Chicago Reader, I’ve got a long review-essay on David Foster Wallace. The review part centers on Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max’s new biography of the author, and the book is just OK. Still, it let me explore Wallace’s relationship to the Midwest  — that’s the essay part — and I hope readers find it intriguing and persuasive.

Now, I could go on about this stuff all day — about how Max’s book corroborates Jonathan Franzen’s essay on Wallace’s inner ugly side; or about how much I’ve come to respect the work of David Lipsky, who consistently got the best quotations out of Wallace (and whose reporting Max relies on relentlessly). But I’ll limit myself to one final aspect of Wallace and the Midwest, and that’s how the region responded to his own writing about it.

The best example comes in the reaction to Wallace’s Harper’s essay on the Illinois State Fair. (You can find a .pdf here.) An editor at the magazine had heard about Wallace moving back to Illinois, and he called the novelist — his U-Haul was still sitting in the drive-way — and pitched him the idea of reporting on the 1993 State Fair. Out of this assignment sprang the nonfiction style that Wallace would later describe to Lipsky as “basically, you know, welcome to my mind for twenty pages. See through my eyes.”

The essay came out the next summer, and it was pure Wallace  — funny, intellectual, empathetic. But most local readers didn’t see it that way. In fact, in a column that ran in Springfield’s State Journal-Register, Toby McDaniel blasted Wallace and his “poison pen.” The State Fair’s organizers were even more outraged, and McDaniel quoted Joe Khayyat, a fair spokesman, at length:

There are so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in this story, it really doesn’t deserve a response. In fact, the only thing the author seems to be consistent with is his gross misrepresentation of the fair and his use of profanity. It’s a typical case of a small-town boy who betrayed his roots when the big city went to his head.

This defense gets deployed any time a Midwestern author produces non-brochure copy about the Midwest, and Wallace’s essay proves how wrong it is. So too does his response to Khayyat and McDaniel. In the State Journal-Register‘s second story on the affair, which ran a few weeks later, a different reporter, Mike Matulis, asked Wallace for his side. “To be perfectly honest with you, Khayyat’s comments bother me,” Wallace told him. “If the piece came off that way, as some one sneering at the Midwest, then that’s really a deficiency in the piece. It really wasn’t meant to do that.”

For the rest of the story, Wallace praised the State Fair — “There is an intensity about the livestock shows that is the same intensity you see in Lincoln Center” — and the state itself.  “It’s incredibly cheap to live here, and I haven’t heard a car alarm since I moved,” he told Matulis. “I’m not kidding.” Wallace was only getting warmed up: “People smile and say ‘hello,’ I don’t have to lock my house every day and women sometimes walk at night by themselves. And when there is a ghastly murder here, it’s an enormous deal.”

He ended the interview by reaffirming his affection for the Midwest: “My resting pulse rate is lower here. It’s really very nice.” And yet, as late as 2010, the State Journal-Register was still smarting about Wallace’s essay. It’s a colorful and, I think, telling episode about Wallace’s personality and his relationship to readers. But while Max includes some interesting details about the accuracy of Wallace’s nonfiction (“We quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for,” Wallace’s sister tells him), he never mentions this little State Fair dust up. Nor does he examine the way Wallace’s journalism evolved from “welcome to my mind” to the intensely rhetorical style of his later pieces. These are just a couple examples of why Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a disappointment, both in terms of its details and its interpretations.

A review of Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away: Essays

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

[San Francisco Chronicle]

In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection of essays, Farther Away. While I liked it less than most — I call it “the book of a writer who’s calming down” — that’s only because I liked Franzen’s earlier nonfiction so much. I especially admire “Why Bother?,” which revises and improves on Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” (better known as “the Harper’s essay”). While researching the review, I found an interesting parallel between “Why Bother?” and “Pain Won’t Kill You,” the first essay in Farther Away, and I’d like to flesh it out here.

But first, it’s worth noting how “Perchance to Dream” became “the Harper’s essay.” As I explain in my review, this happened largely during the publication of The Corrections. Inteviewers kept asking Franzen whether the new novel made good on his promise to “revitalize modern fiction,” as the New York Times Magazine put it in a big profile. The Times traced this back to “Perchance to Dream,” but the essay never made such a promise. Indeed, Franzen has blamed this line of questioning on the Times — and on the interviewers who hadn’t read his essay or his novel. I suspect there’s some truth to this, though I’d also note that the essay’s list of things to stop fretting about (TV, politics, whatever) is presented with such persuasive grumpiness that it’s easy to focus simply on that.

Anyway, when it came time to publish How to Be Alone, Franzen’s first collection of nonfiction, he decided to revise “Perchance” — reordering some paragraphs, removing sour tangents on lit theory and Hollywood screenwriting, cutting a long quotation from a letter by David Foster Wallace. This last edit is pretty interesting, given the competitive relationship between the two authors. One way to understand Farther Away is as a reflection of that relationship — not only in the title essay, on Wallace’s suicide, but in subtler echoes like the fact that Franzen gave “Pain Won’t Kill You” as the commencement address at Kenyon, where Wallace also gave a widely-admired address.

But the larger point is that Franzen’s revisions (and his renaming, from “Perchance” to “Why Bother?”) clarified his essay’s argument. In the introduction to How to Be Alone, Franzen positions the book as “a record of a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance — even a celebration — of being a reader and a writer.” The Harper’s essay records that same movement. It’s the story of how a person went from caring so much he began to despair to caring just enough that he wanted to do better.

What caused Franzen to change? In his essay, it’s a conversation with a linguistic anthropologist who helped him understand the history and reality of literary reading. In his life, it seems to have been the end of his marriage. Franzen told the Times that he and his wife had lived in “shared monastic seclusion” — sharing a tiny apartment where they both wrote eight hours a day, then read another five. After his divorce, he began making more of an effort to get out into the world. “It would be easy to cast him as the ink-stained wretch who lives in an oubliette and come out blinking into the sunshine every once in a while,” Wallace told the Times. “But Jon finds contact with humans nourishing.” I’d also bet that Wallace’s friendship and letters had more to do with Franzen’s growth than we currently realize (and vice versa).

Whatever the causes, Franzen did change. He describes this in the Harper’s essay as “the shift from depressive realism to tragic realism — from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it.” It was this sustainable worldview that allowed him to finish The Corrections.

And that brings us back to “Pain Won’t Kill You” and Farther Away. Late in that address-slash-essay, Franzen talks about how he became an enviornmentalist in college. “The more I looked at what was wrong,” he writes, singling out overpopulation and SUV-style consumption, “the angrier and more people-hating I became.” As his marriage began to dissolve, Franzen decided it best to ignore the environment since there was nothing he could do. “I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small,” he recalls, “but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.”

“But then,” he continues, “a funny thing happened” — and that thing is worth quoting at length:

It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love. And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a sparrow, I could feel my heart overflow with love. . . .

[By] not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved. And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became, strangely, easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

Franzen’s point in this essay is that love — ugly, messy love — improved his relationship with the world. But it makes me think of his earlier essay, too. It’s not for nothing that Franzen’s description of love (“a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you”) sounds a lot like his description of fiction. And I think this shift — from anger-driven environmentalism to love-driven environmentalism, or from depressive realism to tragic realism — explains much of what makes Franzen such a powerful and exasperating writer. It’s why he can seem so cranky and ambivalent. (With categories like these, you’re never entirely one or the other.) But it’s also why he can be so moving and provocative.

“I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded”: A profile of Stephen Greenblatt

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Academia, Books, Features

[The Boston Globe]

In Sunday’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, I’ve got a profile of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. In his new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt writes about the fifteenth century’s rediscovery of Lucretius and his poem On the Nature of Things. Given Greenblatt’s subtitle, it’s no surprise that the book continues his push into the world of popular writing, a push that started with his Will in the World.

Actually, Greenblatt’s been writing reviews for The New Republic and op eds for The New York Times since the 1980s; nothing about his career is easy to summarize or diagnose. Still, writing a Shakespeare biography for Norton seems far different than writing an academic book for the University of Chicago Press. I asked Greenblatt about this (and N.B. that none of the quotations in this post made the profile — Greenblatt’s a compulsively quotable guy). “For me, there isn’t a big gap between the two,” he said about academic and popular writing. “It wasn’t like I was deciding to write detective fiction.”

After doing two interviews with Greenblatt, and reading or re-reading many of his books and essays, I’d say this is one of his defining traits: a weird inability to admit that anything he’s ever done was intentional, programmatic, or calculated. When I asked him about the genesis of New Historicism, for example, he said, “We weren’t a group of people who thought we were going to plot the transformation of the field.” Yet Greenblatt transformed his field — and not enough people point this out — through some very deliberate and unglamorous channels: he edited collections of academic essays; he co-founded a journal and book series; and he conjured up not only broad theoretical concepts, but also specific close-readings (of Marlowe, Spenser, and many, many more) that still occupy specialists in those fields.

So, Greenblatt’s The Swerve highlights his transformation from highly specialized academic to . . . literary journalist? (The Swerve doesn’t have much original scholarship, so far as I [or a scolding Michael Dirda] can tell. Unlike Dirda, though, I think it’s a good book; name me a literary journalist who could pull off as many fun and learned tangents as Greenblatt does in his book.) But The Swerve highlights another transformation for Greenblatt, and it’s the one that drives my profile: How did the scholar who argued that not even Shakespeare could escape the limits of his culture end up writing a book whose subtitle claims that, thanks to one book and one author, The World Became Modern?

It was very, very hard to get Greenblatt to address this. At one point I rather desperately read him the passage from Renaissance Self-Fashioning that comes up in my profile, then asked what his 1980 self would think of his 2011 book. “I think he’d like it,” Greenblatt replied. (He’s also compulsively sly.) Still, after some prodding, he admitted that “I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded. I’m a little more optimistic now.”

Greenblatt remained uneasy about his publisher-provided subtitle. “I’m skeptical about any straight-forward teleology,” he said, like any good scholar. Still, he took literary scholars to task for their retreat from the public sphere. “Our work is important. But something about how that work is presented is self-diminishing, self-defeating.” Greenblatt added: “Why do we spend our lives on this? Why is it exciting? Why is it fun? Is it really just ideological demysticifcation? That’s fine, but there can’t be a full diet of that.”

Brace yourself: the latest, greatest edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography is almost here

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Academia, Books, Features

[Slate]

At Slate, I’ve got an essay on the crazy behind-the-scenes history of Mark Twain’s Autobiography and its various editions. The latest one just arrived, and, over the last six months, it’s been getting some unbelievable hype, thanks in large part to Twain’s instructions that it not be published until 100 years after his death. But I try to show that this story is now repeating itself for the fourth time — and that there’s not that much new in Twain’s new book. Twain clearly overestimated the scandalousness of his autobiography. (Van Wyck Brooks gets the best line on this: “He is going to have a spree, a debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to shock his wife.”) But what if he always intended the embargo as more of a marketing stunt than anything else? That’s the question I kept in mind while researching and writing my essay. And if this is what Twain intended, it worked better than even he could have hoped.

One thing I couldn’t get to in the essay was my problems with the new edition of Twain’s autobiography, which is coming out from the Mark Twain Project and the University of California Press. (What follows is of such limited appeal that I’m going to assume you know who Paine, DeVoto, and Neider are.) The new edition promises to be a major scholarly event, but it’s being treated like more of a popular or literary one. And the editors at the Twain Project have gleefully nodded along with the media’s embargo-driven excitement. (Well, they did push back on the vibrator.) In July, the Twain Project supplied the New York Times with “some of Twain’s spicier comments” for the newspaper’s front-page story on the new edition. But those comments were all published back in Paine’s edition! The attack on Theodore Roosevelt appears, in full, in Paine. So does the comment on Thanksgiving Day (though Paine fussily [and typically] swapped Twain’s “consequently” for “hence”). And while Paine did hold back some of the nastier flourishes in the third example, he still included Twain’s riff that Christianity “is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy.”

Here’s what the Times‘ reporter concluded:

In his unexpurgated autobiography, whose first volume is about to be published a century after his death, a very different Twain emerges, more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet.

This simply isn’t true. That Twain emerged a long time ago; whether or not we’ve noticed is a different matter. I don’t fault the Times‘ reporter for this, just like I don’t fault Granta for hyping its “exclusive first excerpt” of Twain’s autobiography, an excerpt that appeared in full in both Paine and Neider’s editions. But I do fault the Twain Project. Again, as scholars, the editors at the Twain Project have done incredible work. They’re going to put the full autobiography (and its enormous number of variants) online for free. They’ve devoted 300 of the new volume’s 700 pages to a terrific textual apparatus. But these scholarly bells and whistles just make the Twain Project’s complicity with the hype that much more disappointing.

It also makes their treatment of Neider and DeVoto unconscionable. DeVoto represented an enormous improvement over Paine, opening the Twain Papers up to other scholars for the first time. (I’ve developed a bit of a scholarly crush on DeVoto and will, at some point, try to write another post on him and Twain.) But Neider and DeVoto show up in the new edition of Twain’s autobiography only to get knocked down. In what passes for an insult in scholarly circles, the editors at the Twain Project note that DeVoto modernized Twain’s punctuation “with great satisfaction.” There’s little mention of Clara’s crushing influence — which was, if anything, worse than what comes across in my Slate story. DeVoto and Neider were passionate, hard-working, underpaid scholar-critics who introduced Twain’s autobiography to several generations of readers. It’s a mistake to slight either their efforts or the impossible conditions under which they labored. In fact, even more than aiding and abetting the embargo-driven hype, it is a form of scholarly malpractice.

Jimmy Carter’s Second, Polished Draft of History

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera, Politics

[San Francisco Chronicle]

Two days before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, Art Buchwald used his “Capitol Punishment” column to offer some advice to the incoming administration. “The first thing to do when you get to Washington,” Buchwald wrote, “is find a literary agent. The second thing is to buy a four-year diary and fill it every day with vignettes about the mistakes made by the people you work with in the administration. It is never too early to start writing your book.”

I can’t think of a better gloss on Jimmy Carter’s literary career — a career that now extends to White House Diary, his 26th book, which I review in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. The book’s other reviews, as political book reviews so often do, focus on checking Carter against the historical record and drumming up his juicy details. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, except that it doesn’t really work with White House Diary because the book includes so little that’s new. The two stories whirling around the political news cycle — Carter’s belief that the Iran hostages cost him the 1980 election and that Edward Kennedy sabotaged his health care proposal — both appeared 28 years ago in Carter’s Keeping Faith, albeit in slightly milder form. That’s why, in my review, I tried to talk about White House Diary as a diary — as a specific kind of book that readers approach with specific expectations and specific standards. From this perspective, White House Diary is an almost total failure. I never thought I’d have a reason to recommend Keeping Faith (still in print, by the way, as is Carter’s much better Why Not the Best?). But I submit that it’s a more coherent and less manipulative picture of Carter’s presidency.

I do want to expand on two statements in my review. First, I talk about the the growing genre of presidential diaries. While Reagan and Carter were the only twentieth-century presidents to keep consistent diaries, just about all of them dabbled in it. (Many of them also saw their diaries subpoenaed, which explains why recent presidents have kept quiet about their diaries or opted for an alternative — Bill Clinton’s conversations with Taylor Branch, for example.) Truman kept a sporadic diary, as did Eisenhower. Nixon kept a daily diary for 20 months and quotes from it about 150 times in RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. For a while, George H. W. Bush kept a diary as vice president, and he tried (and lapsed) again as president. (Bush was more faithful as a young man in China.) There’s also the related genre of “presidential daily diaries,” the official, obscenely detailed logs of a president’s activity. Carter’s daily diaries often start with this: “5:00: The President received a wake up call from the White House signal board operator.” These documents include entries for the briefest of meetings, every single photo op, even one-minute phone calls. You can browse Carter’s here, along with Gerald Ford’s, Lyndon Johnson’s, and many more presidents on their libraries’ websites. (I won’t get into the pre-Truman diaries, but here’s one fun example: the Massachusetts Historical Society updates a Twitter account with entries from John Quincy Adams’s diaries.)

The second thing I want to touch on is my comparison of Reagan’s and Carter’s diaries. None of the afore-linked reviews make this connection, but I hope my review shows how important it is. (It’s also important to compare a president’s diary with his memoirs. In 2004, plenty of The Reagan Diaries‘ reviewers chuckled at its spelling; as Reagan explains in An American Life, though, he developed a loose and unorthodox system while delivering multiple daily speeches for General Electric. “Of course, this hasn’t done much for my spelling,” in Reagan’s example, becomes “cours ths hsnt don much my splng.”) Reagan’s diary was a huge best-seller in 2004, and I think this comparison suggests one reason Carter resurrected his diary. But the Carter reviewers’ omission of Reagan as a counter-example illustrates something else: how, despite all the noise about their value as history — and this noise normally tops out right after a leak of the president’s megamillion dollar advance — how shockingly disposable these books can be.