In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got an essay on Glenn Beck-as-author, disguised as a dispatch from his latest simulcast book event. Through his radio and television shows, Beck can deliver huge sales boosts to obscure political treatises and to mass-market thrillers — and this gets at what the publishing industry calls his “platform.” It’s why he sells books. But why does he write them? I come to a pretty cynical conclusion in my essay, but other explanations do exist. Still, Beck’s books don’t fit with his off-the-cuff nature. At the book event, he turned a Primanti Brothers sandwich, a Pittsburgh delicacy made up of beef, french fries, and cole slaw, into a metaphor for America’s budget crisis. This metaphor allowed Beck one of his few Obama attacks — he introduced the sandwich as “Michelle Obama’s worst nightmare” — but it also reveals how, um, adaptable he can be. It seems Beck didn’t call Primanti Brothers until six hours before the show. He ordered 300 sandwiches.
Category: Books
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
In today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a review of George W. Bush’s Decision Points. The presidential memoir has become a very odd and very unique media event — an event where the book’s release matters more than the book itself. So the question I kept returning to was this: How does Bush’s book work as a book? That is, does it offer something as a narrative, linear reading experience that the hype does not? The short answer is, yes, it does (Bush’s book is much better than most presidential memoirs); but, no, it’s not always for the best (one reason it’s better is that it captures Bush’s voice and mien, which will turn off plenty of readers).
Anyway, I’ve been making the release vs. book point a lot in the last few weeks — writing about presidential memoirs and TV and, on CBC’s Q radio show, talking about Mark Twain’s autobiography. But I did want to single out one example from Bush’s book. Other than the Kanye West kerfuffle, which I won’t even dignify with a post, the juiciest Decision Points item has been that Barbara Bush showed a young George her miscarried fetus. This story began to circulate even before Bush’s first author interview with Matt Lauer — the New York Post ran a story based on a DVD of the pre-taped interview that it had “exclusively obtained” — but Lauer’s interview really got the ball rolling. MSNBC gave the story the following headline: “Bush: Mother’s miscarriage shaped pro-life views.” The Huffington Post went with: “Bush’s Opposition to Abortion Grew After Mother Showed Him Dead Fetus in a Jar.” The Daily Beast assembled a team of psychoanalytic experts to parse the revelation. The New York Times promised Bush had “started a national conversation — both about his mother, Barbara Bush, and about the complex psychological fallout from miscarriage.”
But the Times did so in a story that was making every effort to prop up this “national conversation.” And that’s how this stuff works. The Bush headlines and absurdist post ops share a tenuous relationship with reality — and no relationship to the former president’s book. First, Lauer was the one who kept pushing the abortion angle. (Bush’s exasperated response: “The purpose of the story really wasn’t to try to show the beginning of a pro-life point of view. It was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.”) Second, the Decision Points version says nothing about abortion or the brandishing of a fetus. Here’s the entire (and entirely mild) episode from the book:
One day, shortly after I learned to drive and while Dad was away on a business trip, Mother called me into her bedroom. There was urgency in her voice. She told me to drive her to the hospital immediately. I asked what was wrong. She said she would tell me in the car.
As I pulled out of the driveway, she told me to drive steadily and avoid bumps. Then she said she had just had a miscarriage. I was taken aback. This was a subject I never expected to be discussing with Mother. I also never expected to see the remains of a fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital. I remember thinking: There was a human life, a little brother or sister. [Bush’s emphasis]
In Bush’s book, this is a genuinely affecting moment — not only on its own, but also because Bush describes the death of his younger sister Robin a few pages earlier. In our media ecosystem, however, it has become a perfect example of how the reaction to presidential memoirs plays out — very little initial substance, followed by a string of stories offering diminishing returns, often in the form of metacoverage (reaction about the interview which was about the book, etc.). Like I said, very odd, though maybe not very unique.
Brace yourself: the latest, greatest edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography is almost here
[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.
The Dabbler
In one of several recent cover stories — this one in The Advocate — James Franco complained about the early reactions to Palo Alto, his new collection of short stories:
If websites like Gawker.com or PerezHilton.com don’t like my writing, I can live with that. There is this crazy phenomenon in the blogosphere that is so hostile to anyone being creative, and if I incur that hostility from people who’ve probably read five short stories in the last 10 years, it doesn’t really bother me.
Fair enough. Gawker commenters dismiss Franco reflexively, while commenters on pure entertainment sites endorse him in the same way (sexy AND smart!). His new book does deserves a serious review, and that’s what I tried to give it in the New York Press.
The result, in short, is not pretty — better than Rivers Cuomo, but not nearly as good as Ethan Hawke. I have yet to run into Franco, here in New Haven, but I’ve got nothing against him personally and enjoy more than a few of his movies. As I mention in the review, I think it’s great that he’s going to grad school. But I also think that publishing a book is different. And that’s the main point I wanted to make: his book has siphoned editorial attention, effusive blurbs, media buzz, and literary shelf space from other, better books.
Let me give a positive example. Sam Munson’s The November Criminals, a debut novel I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal, is a wonderful read with all kinds of interesting and important things to say. Munson sets one great scene in a high school classroom, which happens to be the setting for one of Franco’s better short stories, too. It’s worthwhile to parallel them.
The November Criminals stars Addison Schacht, a nihilistic teenager who would fit right in with Franco’s cast. (Addison actually sells pot, so this would solve one of Palo Alto’s mysteries: where the characters get all their illicit substances.) Anyway, Addison is sitting in his English class, enduring a facile discussion of The Aeneid, his favorite book. When one of his pretty, smarmy classmates starts talking about how Virgil “glorified violence” and “prevented dialogue,” Addison loses it:
I launched into a speech, in a choked voice. ‘No, man, you’re missing the whole point. You can’t apply our virtues here. You can’t! They were operating under a whole different set of ideas. You can’t judge them. . . .
The scene goes on for another page or two (you can read it here), and there’s plenty of funny details and snappy writing. What makes it so good, though, is its relationship to everything that comes before and after. The whole novel is about judging — and about Addison’s attempt to make it through life with both evaluative standards and a measure of empathy. Munson manifests this in some interesting political ways, which I talked about in my Journal review. But it colors every interaction in the novel, including this one. It’s smartly done and terrifically open-ended.
Now, back to Franco. In “American History,” a history teacher has his class “act out a mock debate between the slave states and the free states.” Jeremy, the narrator, takes this assignment a little too seriously, offending several other characters, getting beat up, and creating a couple of genuinely and uncomfortably funny exchanges (“‘Hitler is timeless!’ screeched Stephen”). But this is marred by the writing — the “rocky stream” example I singled out in my review comes from this story — and, even more, by the motivations. Jeremy, it turns out, did it all for a girl. And the girl didn’t even notice.
This doesn’t ruin Franco’s story, by any means. But it does prevent it from achieving the insights and inventive appeal of something like The November Criminals. One of the more interesting things about adolescence is that, as in every stage of human development, each person remains very different. But in adolescence, we all try so hard to fit in. That’s a great dynamic for fiction to explore. Munson’s does. Franco’s, not so much.
David Markson, Part III
Sunday night (Monday morning in Australia), I appeared on ABC’s The Book Show to talk about authors’ libraries with Anita Barraud. If you want to listen to the interview, click here. And if you’ve found this site through the ABC, check out my original story in the Boston Globe, my supplemental blog post on Markson and Melville, and an NPR segment on it.
Craig Fehrman 