Ephemeral Firmament

From the Archives: Beaumont and Tocqueville in America

I have been spending nearly all my reading and writing time in the archives, and I plan to do so for quite a while, which explains why EphEff has been so quiet. I'm looking forward to there being a tangible result of all that research down the road, but in the meantime in this space I expect that mostly what I'll have to offer, along with a few Firmaments to keep the title of the blog from being a complete fraud, is gems I've come across in my reading, ephemeral or otherwise.

My first such is from a book that used to be called, when it was first published in 1936, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, by a Yale professor named George Wilson Pierson. Somehow I've made it through my education without ever reading Democracy in America, but I'm not sure I could find it as charming or worthwhile as what I've found dipping into this book about the making of that book. It's a sort of documentary account of Tocqueville's nine months in the young republic (and Canada) with his colleague Gustave de Beaumont, with whom he produced the report on American prisons that was the official purpose of their visit. (Afterwards, Tocqueville turned to writing Democracy, while Beaumont penned a novel about racial prejudice called Marie, or Slavery in the United States that I'm very surprised, from the little I've learned about it, wasn't a staple Americanist text when I was in grad school in the '90s.)

Both Tocqueville and Beaumont took extensive notes about their travels and wrote many letters back to France, which provide the bulk of Pierson's book, and in both this documentary form and the way that Pierson's appealing and good-naturedly insightful style matches that of his subjects, it reminds me of one of my favorite books, Francis Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary. In the little bits of the book I've read both travelers have their moments as correspondents, but the favorite one I've found so far comes from Beaumont, in a letter written to his family in France during his stay in upstate New York at the home of John Canfield Spencer, the man who would eventually edit the English version of Democracy in America:

Now you must know why we have stopped here on our way. There is at Cananda[i]gua a Mr. Spencer, member of the New York legislature, who wanted us to come spend some days with him and to whose wishes we have yielded. He is the most distinguished man whom I have yet met in America. He is well versed in all the political questions which interest his country and possesses the most precise understanding of the judiciary institutions of the United States. He is one of the three commissioners to whom the New York legislature has confided the trust of revising the laws of the state.

We spend all our time with him in conversations from which we have everything to gain; as soon as we are alone we write down what he has said. I have not yet seen a single person from whom we have drawn as much as from him. There are at his house two charming women, his daughters Mary and Catherine, who would give us terrible distractions if once and for all we hadn't made up our minds to have none. Mary is the prettier of the two; she has that white and rose complexion, occasionally to be found with Englishwomen but almost unknown in France. I have not yet seen in the United States such pretty eyes as hers, they have a velvet softness it is impossible to describe. But why talk so long about her? Were I to continue you would think me in love, and the truth is that I am not. A long sojourn with her might be unhealthy, but in three or four days I shall quit Cananda[i]gua never to come back. After all, a woman, perfectly beautiful and possessing that bonté which is almost banal with American women, is a thing so rare that it is altogether natural to speak of it.

I love the picture of these two young Frenchman joining the legislator's menage and adoringly recording the remarks of the father at the same time that they are no doubt charming his charming daughters, if Beaumont's letter, which is so French you can almost hear it spoken by Pepe le Pew, is any measure.

I just have a couple of side remarks to make, both about books I've read even less of than this one. The first is that I fully expect that if I read Democracy in America as well as Tocqueville and Beaumont I would find the more famous book the lesser one. Of course Pierson's book depends on the significance of Tocqueville's for much of its power and drama, but from what I can tell it contains Tocqueville's ideas but embedded in the compelling--and yes, charming--stories of these young men and the people they met (neither Spencer nor his daughters, for example, are anywhere to be found in the index for Democracy in America). Perhaps it says more about me than the books themselves that it's the kind of book I'd much rather read.

And the other is to lament the way Beaumont seems to have been written out of history. As I alluded to above, the title of Pierson's book has changed: in the Johns Hopkins University Press reprint, it's now just Tocqueville in America. It appears to be the same book inside, but poor Beaumont, despite providing much of its contents, has apparently become just an encumbrance to the marketing of their story. Which also brings to mind a recent retelling of Tocqueville's story with a similar name, Peter Carey's novel Parrot and Olivier in America. Carey likely was drawn to the story by some of the same qualities that make Pierson's book so appealing, and no doubt has his own reasons for how he has changed their story, but on the face of it at least he too appears to have removed Beaumont. His Olivier is a stand-in for Tocqueville, but his Parrot, Olivier's traveling companion, is a foil in temperament and class, a "the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver," unlike Beaumont, who was a French aristocrat like his friend Tocqueville. Perhaps Carey couldn't resist the dramatic and theoretical tension of that clash of classes (played out in the class-confounding territory of America); perhaps he just couldn't help but think in the more standard buddy-picture conventions that define so many American tales of the road. But it's a shame to see charming young Beaumont erased once again.

A Great First Act: Discovering Moss Hart's Memoir in the Desert

Other people, when they arrive at a vacation house, may go out and check the views first, or the quality of the sheets, or see how far it is to the beach or the lake. I, of course, head to the bookshelves. I love the idea of coming across a book by chance at such a place--a book that lives there and won't come home with me--and opening it up with vague curiosity and getting drawn into an experience I couldn't have planned. It's usually only an idea rather than a reality for me, though, because I always bring along so many books of my own that I don't leave any room for serendipity.

There are a few exceptions: an apartment I sublet in Munich, where the tenant had clearly taken a class on the American sixties (in English), so I read Tom Hayden's memoir and--finally--All the President's Men instead of studying German, my reason for being there in the first place; the copy of Alec Wilkinson's Midnights, about being a cop on Cape Cod, that's always on the shelf the house my aunt and uncle rent there and that I've probably read two or three times by now. And there's that copy of Waylon Jennings's autobiography I liberated from a poolside shelf a few years back and decided deserved a better home in Seattle.

But last month I knew I was headed for a place with an outstanding collection of books, and for once I left some slack in my reading plans. It's a desert ranch that's been run by the same family for decades, and while some of the books there were left behind by previous guests, many of them--'50s hardcovers especially--have the name of the woman who once owned the place (her sons run it now) inscribed on the inside. I brought my usual assortment from home, of course, and read a few (and one of them, Christopher Sorrentino's Trance, which I'm halfway through, is so far one of the best novels I've read in years). But I also left myself room to sample the pickings there, which turned out to be even better than I remembered, with dozens of books I'd always wanted to check out. On a couple of evenings I sat down with a little stack and a wolfish grin and happily sampled from, among others, Victoria Glendenning's Rebecca West biography, Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, Whittaker Chambers's Witness, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World (yes, equal time!), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and, best of all, Moss Hart's Act One.

I knew Act One was a huge bestseller in the '50s and that it's thought of as one of the great theater memoirs, and I'd always wanted, in a vague way, to read it. And so I opened it up somewhere in the middle, saw he was working with George S. Kaufman on something, and said, "Hm, I'll see how this goes." Well, so much for my evening: about four hours later I closed the book, blinking my eyes in wonder at one of the most thrilling and enjoyable reading experiences I've had since staying up all night finishing Into Thin Air (which, come to think of it, I also came across by chance on vacation).

Hart doesn't climb a Himalaya in Act One. No, he does something far more interesting and impressive to me: he writes a play that, after an endless (but probably not atypical) series of setbacks, detours, and lucky (and earned) breaks, becomes a Broadway hit. Or, rather, he cowrites that play, with the Mr. Kaufman mentioned above, who these days occupies roughly the same half-legendary, half-forgotten place that Hart does in people's memories, but then was the king of the Broadway comedy while Hart was a young nobody, slaving away at play after play to break out of his exhausting and underpaid niche in little-theater productions and social directing in the Catskills. Only when he turned to comedy and wrote a Hollywood satire called Once in a Lifetime did he catch the eyes of a producer and then of Kaufman, who agreed to collaborate with the newcomer on a rewrite for Broadway.

And so begins Hart's adventure, beginning with awkward, workaholic writing sessions in Kaufman's brownstone; moving on through promising but failed out-of-town tryouts, with the two writers going back to their hotel after each show for all-night rewrites, trying to fix the second act and then the third; and finally to the kind of career-making hit opening night that a playwright can only dream of. Part of the fun for me (which I've now just spoiled for you--sorry) was not quite knowing what would happen: I knew Hart would eventually make it big, but I had never heard of Once in a Lifetime, so I didn't know if this was the one that broke him or was just a setback along the way. And I didn't even know that the story of that play's production would take up the entire second half of the book: I thought I was just reading a little episode in a memoir of many successes, but it kept going on and on, piling complication on top of complication, and then suddenly, soon after the opening night's final curtain, the book ended with the last word, "Intermission," leaving all his later work (like The Man Who Came to Dinner) for another book, and explaining--duh!--the title. (Hart never got to write Act Two, though, since he died just two years after Act One came out.)

But the story of Once in a Lifetime is more than enough for a book: almost impossibly dramatic, with the young Hart convincing a defeated Kaufman to keep going--not once but twice!--and try radical, late changes in the production as the vast expense and expectation of a Broadway opening fast approached, and with an absolutely joyful bravura final moment that I won't spoil for you here. And in Hart's hands it's an absolute marvel of storytelling, with wonderful character sketches (of Kaufman especially) and brilliantly constructed set pieces that are as effective with observant little bits of business (like Hart driven mad with hunger while Kaufman, abstemious and oblivious, provides just a few cookies and tiny sandwiches at their endless work sessions, or the two playwrights pacing in opposite directions at the back of the theater, too nervous to watch the tryout performances) as with the bigger dramas (of course it's all just about puttin' on a show, so how big can the drama get?). And its somehow fitting to have such a masterful demonstration of how to construct a story when the very subject of that story is the struggle of these two men to solve the dramatic problems of their play.

Perhaps it's that nested drama (shades of my beloved Topsy-Turvy) that left me wanting to turn the book into a screenplay more than I ever have before. (Actually, it's something I rarely have the urge to do.) Surely, I thought, with a bestseller that big and with such a thrillingly filmable show-biz tale, someone had done it before. And it's true: someone did, a 1963 movie directed by Hart's old pal Dore Schary and starring George Hamilton (?!?) as Hart, Jason Robards as Kaufman, and--oh my lord--Bert Convy in a tiny role as Archie Leach, one of Hart's fellow stagestruck aspirants who, of course, would soon become Cary Grant. But how good could that movie be--it's not available on video, and my god: Bert Convy as Cary Grant?!? You can actually get a glimpse of him in the trailer below.

Well, watching the trailer, which makes it look like an dutifully literal transcription of some of the best scenes in the book, does give me pause. Maybe the fact that Act One reads so much like a movie would make the movie version seem like a movie you've seen a hundred times before. But a half century later, maybe it's time to try again.

 

Robert Caro Makes Me Cry Tears of Joy

I can't get enough of the Robert Caro profiles, even though Caro and his wife and Robert Gottlieb, his editor, are apparently telling the same stories to everyone (or at least to Chris Jones and Charles McGrath). It's a story that makes me sad and heartened and awed and joyful; it makes me want to put on a suitcoat and tie and go to a midtown office every day with pieces of paper pinned on the walls. I've always thought LBJ's was one of the great American stories, but Robert Caro's is one too.

I don't have more to add beyond the photos below (borrowed from Esquire), which I would like to make into a poster for my own wall, and the question: how would something like this happen now? Who would fund such a folly? A new Caro would probably have to be an academic to pay for his habit. Or can you imagine someone pitching a five-volume biography of, say, Bill Clinton, on Kickstarter?

Where Is the There There? More Non-Luddite Grouching About Ebooks

I'm happy today to point to my first contribution over at The Millions, a bookish site I've been enjoying and admiring for years: "Confessions of a Reluctant Fetishist: Keep Books Adulterated." It's a reply of sorts to a post in praise of ebooks Tim Parks wrote for the NYRB blog over a month ago--I liked the case he made for them, which I thought hadn't been made (to my eyes) very often before, but I also thought it helped me understand some reasons I still prefer printed books. I started writing it to post here, but thought it could stand a few more readers than I can usually drum up, so I'm glad Mr. Magee over there was willing to post it.

After finishing it I had a further thought, a related one though I'm not sure it would fit into the essay. As I say there, one problem with ebooks is that they don't have a spatial structure to put your idea of the book into (and no, that percentage gauge at the bottom doesn't count). It makes it nearly impossible to move back and forth quickly in a book (unless you know an exact word to search for) the way you can do so easily in a printed book (and which I realize now I do all the time when reading, especially nonfiction or anything I'm trying to reread or write about).

Now, I do at least as much reading online as I do in printed books, and I don't feel that same unmoored feeling reading online that I do with an ebook. In part I think that's because web pages have more visual structure than ebook pages: either scrolling or paging through a long web article gives you a physical sensation that nearly approximates a printed book or magazine. But online reading has a further advantage that most physical books don't have: it has a place you can point to and share. (I know--big insight into the benefits of social media!) A blog post or an online essay (or a photo of a cat) may not exist in your hands, but, perhaps even better, it exists in a consistent place for anyone else online. A URL is, importantly, an address.

But an ebook doesn't exist in the same way: it doesn't have an address you can share. In other words, it doesn't have the spatial benefits of a printed book, and it doesn't have the social benefits (which are themselves based on occupying a particular place in the virtual network) of an online piece. This came across to me most clearly when I read a Kindle Single recently, Ann Patchett's "The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life." I liked it quite a bit (I eat that sort of stuff up), and usually with something like that I'd want do something with it after I read it: poke back around in it, write about it, share it here. But I've found it hard to do. If I want to go back and look through it again, I have to work within the linear straightjacket of my Kindle to find the parts I'm looking for, without the visual memory cues of static pages to help. And if I wanted to share it with people, well, there's nothing to point to--well, except for this excerpt on Byliner.

I understand the value of not making her ebook available to share with everyone. I love that Patchett's making a buck from a lot of people downloading this cheap minibook--I hope she can use it to help support her new bookstore--and I'm happy to pay my share. But the result, when I want to work with this book and not just dispose of it after I've read it, is that it feels like it hardly exists. I can't settle down into it and wander around the way I like to with a book I've read and want to think more about, and I can't point other people to it. I imagine Tim Parks might suggest that it should live abstractly in my mind at this point, but my mind, apparently, needs a network outside itself to thrive as a reader and a rereader.

Nineteenth-Century Novelists: I Have Found Your Plot Machine

To be honest, I first picked up this little book off a display table because of its striking resemblance to the cover designs of the even littler Cloverfield Press limited editions my sister designed and printed not long ago (see samples below, including the Miranda July booklet that's now selling for $200+ on Amazon). The resemblance is striking, no? Just sayin'. But I should also say that if there is a nonrandom connection between the two, it speaks well of both parties, since a) they are all lovely covers, striking not only because of their similarity, b) imitation--->flattery, etc., and c) the Wakefield Press series of which The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy is part looks really promising.

The reason I not only picked up The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy but took it home with me is that when I flipped through its pages it made me laugh again and again. It is, to begin with, exactly what it says it is in its fabulous title: a taxonomy of these two roles central to society's exchanges, by Charles Fourier, the pre-Marx French utopian socialist best remembered from your economics classes (by me at least) as the guy who thought the seas would turn into lemonade.

What makes you laugh about these hierarchies, though, is not their preposterousness but their relentlessly clear-headed qualities of observation. They aren't the formulations of a fantasist, but a novelist: a nineteenth-century realist novelist, to be specific, for what would the nineteenth-century novel be without the two subjects of adultery and financial failure? Fourier lists eighty different species of cuckolds and thirty-six of bankrupts, and each description reads like a novel (or at least a Maupassant story) in miniature. For example:

19. The Auxiliary or Coadjutor Cuckold is a man who rarely makes an appearance in the household and only shows up to spread joy, reproach his wife's fear-stricken lovers for not laughing and drinking, and urges them to forget their squabbles and live like good republicans and share and share alike. He is an aid to commerce: horns are roses for him.

55. The Pretentious, or Self-Satisfied, Conceited Cuckold is a man who believes his wife to be so honored to have him as a husband that she would not even dream of paying heed to any suitors, whom he looks upon as victims unworthy of consideration. They gain ground all the more easily: the security in which he lives makes a husband easygoing and negligent on matters of surveillance, and eventually favors the secret affair within the household.

and

16. The Transcendant Bankruptcy calls for a wide-ranging plan, immense and rapid growth, a trading syndicate utilizing thirty or forty sales assistants, numerous ships, colossal reations with every country, and then a sudden collapse, a terrible fall whose repercussions echo throughout the four corners of the world and leave behind such a tangled mess that businessmen will be skimming profits off its repercussions for ten years after. It is an operation in which mercantile genius reveals itself in all its glory. It must offer a loss of at least three-quarters, for everything needs to be lavishly drawn in this vast tableau.

Honestly, if you're a novelist (particularly a nineteenth-century one), I urge you to pick up a copy of The Hierarchies for purely practical reasons: it's a reference far more fecund than a whole stack of those Writers Digest fakebooks, and, of course, more entertaining. I've only glanced through the little book so far, and I'm hardly doing Fourier's philosophy justice with this amused cherry-picking (these funny sketches were in the service of extensive and wryly revolutionary ideas about sex and commerce), but at the least, if you are in the market for amused cherry-picking, you really could not ask for more.

P.S. As promised, here are few from the Cloverfield vaults:

The Mad and Extraordinary Bob Tashman

I perked up when reading Claire Messud's tribute to Bob Silvers on the Paris Review Daily last week (I was already pretty perky, since Claire Messud writing about Bob Silvers is fairly high on my list of best possible blog posts, somewhere alongside Mark Ibold on Lebanon bologna--both of which probably tell you more about me than you need to know), when she mentioned starting work in the ad department at the New York Review of Books in the summer of 1988, because that same summer, perhaps my favorite of my forty-five so far, I worked down the hall at 250 W. 57th St. on The Reader's Catalog, an NYRB spinoff that might have been big if it wasn't for, well, the Internet.

I came down to the NYRB offices to make copies and just soak up the general heaped-up, anachronistic braininess (they still used typewriters, while we used floppy discs!), though I wish I had been unintimidated enough to soak up more. Like Messud that year, I never met Silvers (I didn't even hear his "sonorous and elegant voice"), though unlike her I did meet his co-editor, the great Barbara Epstein, in a short conversation I vividly remember flubbing. But the detail in her account that made me perk up further was the parenthetical but affectionate mention of the one editor at the Review I did get to know a little:

(I had, on the other hand, many mad and wonderful conversations with the late Bob Tashman, who roved the office with apparently much time on his hands and who, although balding, had an impressive corona of hair emerging from his shirt collar. His long-worked-upon American Decameron, alas, we will never now see.)

Bob Tashman made a wonderfully similar impression on me at the same time (right down to the hair coming out of the collar). He was friends with my boss at the Catalog, and he did have enough time on his hands, and enough friendly generosity, to have a few somewhat mad conversations with a clueless, goofball undergraduate like me. His voice, as I recall it in my ear now, had a sort of impish snarl to it, and though he was funny pretty much all the time, I remember a couple of his lines in particular. One, involving George Bush Sr. also choosing Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, would probably not survive the retelling but was very funny at the time. The other was a sly imitation of the founder of the Catalog, Jason Epstein, describing a homemade mayonnaise.

He wasn't like anyone I'd ever met, and I think I idly felt that a window had opened up on an adulthood in which you could be serious and smart and still have a great, subversive time. "Idly" is the operative word there: I didn't really do anything to seek that world out--I was, typically, content just to observe and enjoy--but I remembered him well enough in the decades that followed, and was curious enough about what he was doing (and who he really was in the first place, since of course I didn't ask!) to Google his name from time to time once that became possible. Surprisingly little came up, until a couple of years ago I came across the last search result you want to find: notice of his death at 53 from pancreatic cancer.

Messud's is the first mention of him I've come across by chance, and it thrilled me to hear that someone remembered him as I did. I hadn't just made him up! And of course it made me wonder: what was this "American Decameron"? A grand, mad plan he liked to talk about, or something he was actually working on? Part of what always made me curious about him was the mystery of these brainy, literary people who publish so little under their own names. I know there are scores of them scattered around New York at magazines and publishing houses--I've met a few since--but I'm always amazed they can go through their lives so immersed in shepherding words and ideas into print with, apparently, so little drive to publish them under their own byline. (It's a modest stance that I imagine is becoming as anachronistic as the NYRB's typewriters.)

I searched, of course, on "bob tashman american decameron" and found nothing more, but did come across what as far as I can tell is nearly the only other real mention of him out there,* but one that confirms his mad charisma. It's an aside again, in a post on an entirely different subject, this time by a colleague from his later stint at Granta, where Bob apparently moved after the NYRB:

In those days, the magazine had something of a surplus of testosterone, mostly in the formidable shape of the bearded Buford and the extraordinary Bob Tashman, (now sadly departed) an inspired, and slightly crazed import from the New York Review of Books. Tensions around deadline time ran high, particularly among would-be alpha males in the spring, and release was sought in curious ways. Often our editorial meetings were preceded by impromptu push-up challenges or ferocious arm wrestling bouts. After these sessions, with the blood pumping, Bob and Bill would bond over a raucous a capella duet of the Sam the Sham hit. It reminded them, I guessed, of happier days in collegiate America, when men were men, and they weren’t surrounded by uptight Brits, reading proofs.

I feel a little sad we never got down to arm-wrestling or howling "Wooly Bully" in the Fisk Building, but maybe Buford was the necessary catalyst to push Bob into manly hysteria.

With stories like these out there, I'm sure he is well-remembered by many, and I post this in part so there will be one more entry when people search "Bob Tashman," and perhaps in the hope of hearing from someone who knew Bob better than I did, and who would know more about who he was. I'm curious to know more.

* I've since found a few pieces under the "Robert Tashman" byline: two of them defenses of cultural productions others have found indefensible: Altman's Pret-a-Porter and, amazingly, O.J. Simpson's I Want to Tell You, and the other an appreciation of Salman Rushdie's little BFI book on The Wizard of Oz, which includes, oddly enough, a knock against Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories--odd, since based on other Web evidence, Bob was the editor of that book. It takes a bit of a leap to hear his spoken voice in the more formal and even a little stiff style of those written pieces--they are not overtly madcap--but his contrarian learnedness is clear.

Listening to Gerhard Richter and the Late Harry Crews

I began this day with the news that Harry Crews had died, which led me to this:

Dwight Garner posted an appreciation, and Maud Newton, former student and longtime admirer, is working on something longer [update: she finished it], but you can visit her archives for a number of Crews-related posts. Crews is still for the most part on my lengthy yet-to-read list, but all day I had the first lines of the video above running through my head:

The writer's job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing, to look at it, to not blink, to not be embarrassed by it or ashamed by it. Just strip it down, and let's get down to where the blood is, the bone is, instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff. Luxury.

About two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I threw away half a novel. Threw it away. Because I'd made a wrong turn, and man, you make a wrong turn and you just keep on that wrong turn and pretty soon you've got that much stuff that won't work. The amateur, or the coward, or the non-writer, will try to keep it and make it work 'cause he doesn't want to have to throw it away and do all of that over again, another way. The real artist, with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire, and does it again.

And then I ended the day at the new documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting, watching Richter demonstrate by example and rarely by words, saying little more than that he has to keep working at a painting until it looks done to him--until it looks good for days and not just hours--or until he ruins it, and telling a story of a fellow student in art school who whistled while he painted, while Richter thought, "You have to be a better critic than that. You're talking yourself into being happy with what you are doing." (I can't find a way to embed the trailer, but you can watch it via the link above. The image below is from the most moving shot in the film, as the old painter works to push his giant squeegee across his painting, not even seeing what it reveals until he has made his way across to the other side.)

With those stern, tireless voices in my head, there is even less reason than usual not to wake up tomorrow and try to do some good work.

 

 

 

Is It the Great (or At Least Goofily Good) Unacknowledged DeLillo Novel?

It's been a bit since I've posted, since I've been working on some things I hope you'll see soon in other spaces, but another item arrived in the mail that I had to share. It used to be I'd get excited about galleys of big books that arrived months ahead of pub date; now a big day for me is when some semi-obscure out-of-print book with a great backstory I've ordered shows up in the mail, and this week's was a good one: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell. Enjoy the front and back covers:

You may know the story behind this goof of a "memoir": it was written by none other than the great brooding Bronxian himself, Don DeLillo (in collaboration with a former ad-agency colleague named Sue Buck), and disowned by its author, who had it removed from his list of published works and apparently has never officially acknowledged his paternity. I had always been fascinated by the idea of the book, and when I was recently reminded of it by my fellow bibliophile Dallas (who also turned me on to No Big Deal), I realized there was no reason I couldn't get a copy for myself, if only for the pleasure of filing it in the "D"s next to Americana.

I haven't had a chance to read much yet, but here's how it starts:

If a man's name sounds right whether you say it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale.

Sanders Meade, class of '67, was the Rangers' general manager when I made my first appearance under the smoky lights. Sanders's job was to wear plaid double-knit pants and a leisure-suit jacket with his shirt open at the top and the shirt collar worn outside the jacket. That's all you have to know about him, excepting his surprising prowess the time we hopped into bed during the snows in southern Ontario. I couldn't tell you why I wanted Sanders. He was the absolute antithesis.

Oh, I can't tell you how it lightens my heart to see DeLillo, who increasingly seems to be carrying the weight of history and consciousness on his slim, aging back, messing around like this!

A few years back Gerald Howard (once DeLillo's editor) told what appears to be the most complete story of its publication out there, and it's a good one: rejected by Knopf when DeLillo submitted it under his own name, he published it as "Cleo" with another publisher and after a spirited publicity stunt involving the lady on the back cover above it became "by far" his top-selling novel until White Noise five years later (in which, by the way, the cultural-id-channelling character Murray Jay Suskind, first introduced in Amazons, memorably reappears).

Is it just a novelty I can stick on my shelf and laugh about? I think it's more than that. Dallas, in a 1998 article in Notes in Contemporary Literature (sorry--it's not online, so you'll have to look it up in your library unless you can get Dallas to send you a xerox too) that may well have been the most thorough discussion of its authorship until Howard's, argued it "should be considered a legitimate part of his oeuvre," and I certainly agree. Published between Running Dog and The Names, just before DeLillo hit his midcareer peak with White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, it seems a crucial element in his development, and only more so (don't you agree, Dr. Freud?) because DeLillo has tried so hard to suppress it from his identity. I rather expect that when that first, mammoth biography of the man comes out in 2035 or so, the Amazons interlude is going to be given its own chapter.

I've always been struck by the moment in his career DeLillo describes in his Paris Review interview, when he was writing The Names (soon after, one assumes, finishing Amazons), and, inspired in part by the "clear light of the Aegean Islands" and the gravity of the "letters carved on stones all over Athens," he approached his writing with a new, "deeper level of seriousness." "Some of the work I did in the 1970s," he says, "was off-the-cuff, not powerfully motivated. I think I forced my way into a couple of books that weren’t begging to be written, or maybe I was writing too fast." Since Amazons was the last book he had written at that point, and the one that he has since disowned, you can't help but think it's at least part of what he had in mind, the sort of unmotivated, unserious goof that he wanted to leave behind.

I've always looked at that moment as a powerful and important one, since he did go on soon after to write the wonderful (and yes, deeply serious) books (Libra is my favorite) that made him such an exciting force in our literature. But thinking of the austere, portentious novelist he's become since (I confess that I'm making that judgment mostly second-hand, since after the terrible Cosmopolis I've lost my heart for keeping up with him), seeing a joyously inventive book like Amazons (well, maybe it wasn't joyous for him--in fact, it sounds like it wasn't) is a refreshing reminder of a loose and playful side to DeLillo that he has, for better or worse, outgrown. I've already explained here that I'm not an author completist, so it may not surprise you (though it still surprises me) that I've never actually gone back and read any pre-Names DeLillo, the books like Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street that he has since distanced himself from (calling them "hasty" and "shaggy") almost as much as he has from Amazons. But now I want to: whether I start with Amazons or go even further back, I think they could be a tonic. And they might be for him too. 

Flipping the Trims into the Bin

As I've gotten older, and more committed to a particular vocation (the exact parameters of which I'm still working out), I've accumulated a few professional paths I can imagine I would have pursued in another version of my life: sleep researcher, Kafka scholar, and, most longingly, film editor. For a movie lover who could not possibly bear the stress nor summon the multi-tasking authority required to direct a picture, it seems the perfect job: take the images created by someone else and craft them, frame by frame, into scenes and stories. (Even though I'm a word person, it's actually more appealing to me than screenwriting--maybe because it seems closer to the heart of filmmaking, while screenwriting has an inherently frustrated relationship to the art.)

Would I be any good at it? I really don't know. My biggest character flaw probably would be that I'm a bit of a (a bit of a?) pack rat in terms of both things and ideas: I can see the potential value in almost anything, from an old cereal box to a poorly framed photograph, as long as they somehow reveal the human hand. That might not be the best quality in a film editor, who doubtless needs to be more ruthless. I can imagine, say, sitting at the editing suite with Terry Gilliam and saying, "Gee, you're right, Terry. That stuff is all fascinating. I think this really needs to be a five-hour movie, no matter what the studio says."

I've posted recently about probably the best-known, and certainly the most theoretically articulate, film editor, Walter Murch, and recently, on the Museum of the Moving Image site, I came across a very enjoyable interview with probably the only other celebrity editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar winner indentified even more strongly with Martin Scorsese than Murch is with Francis Ford Coppola. It's a fairly old interview, recorded in 2002 after a screening of Raging Bull, and just before Gangs of New York was released. And for me it covered some familiar ground, since listening to the commentary tracks to Raging Bull (there are tons of them on the deluxe DVD), Schoonmaker's among them, was one of my favorite art experiences of the past few years.

But it still seemed fresh, and really, I could listen to her talk for days. I often say that Scorsese, along with Jonathan Lethem, is one of my very favorite talkers, and Schoonmaker, seen above while working on Woodstock, her first major gig, is nearly as appealing: not quite as analytically enthusiastic as he, but close, and with an unperturbable calmness that you can imagine as a useful complement to his more anxious obsessions. I love the way Marty talks, but I also love the way everyone talks about Marty, since clearly his passions are infectious and draw similiarly passionate and hard-working craftspeople to him.

I usually favor interview transcripts over audio, but in this case I'd recommend the recording, to capture some of her aplomb. I tried to skim back through the transcript for a high point to excerpt here, but I think my favorite moment is this small one, which may or may not translate and is probably better experienced in the context of her larger discussion of switching over--reluctantly but inevitably--to digital editing. She's talking about going back to analog editing on film when she worked on a non-Scorsese movie after she and Scorsese had moved on to digital:

Yes; it was funny, because I found after about a week or so, I was enjoying flipping the trims into the bin, because I always used to know how to do that. You know, you have to do it a certain way, so the end of it will get in.

I just love that little workaday detail, "flipping the trims into the bin," one of the simple pleasures of a craftsperson's life (which could apply to almost anyone who learns to do something well, from parking cars to crafting Excel spreadsheets). Meanwhile, there's more traditionally substantive material in the long interview, from lots of detail about shooting and editing the fight sequences in Raging Bull to why she works so well with Scorsese. Podcasts don't usually fit into my life very well, since I usually can't concentrate on other words while I'm working--I envy my wife and my sister who have more space in their working heads for that kind of soundtrack--but I'm going to go back to the museum's site for more: Errol Morris, Jane Campion, and, yes, Terry Gilliam.

Turing's Cathedral at Town Hall

Thanks to a call from my friend John, I got out of the house Monday night to hear someone talk, something I did all the time a decade ago, before a) I had kids, and b) I was lucky enough to have a job where a lot of those people came to talk to us around a Starbucks table or into a microphone I was holding. I don't have that job anymore (I do still have kids), and what I miss perhaps most about it is getting to listen to those fascinating people when they come to town. But it took going out and seeing a smart author speak to make me realize how much I missed it.

George Dyson was the one talking, at Town Hall (a former cathedral of sorts itself, its great vault having been built by the Christian Scientists almost a hundred years ago). I only knew the most superficial things about him (mainly whom he is related to), but his story (dropping out of high school to live in a tree house and build kayaks and then returning to the family business in a way by becoming a self-taught historian of science and technology) and his new book (Turing's Cathedral, on the development of the computer) both seemed promising. I still only know slightly less superficial things about him and his work now, but a few seem worth noting here.

First is his book, and very first is its cover. I'm sometimes skeptical of book covers that merely hinge on a witty idea, but this one is both witty and, well, as profound as a book cover can be. It doesn't all come across that well online, but the cover is designed to look like an old punchcard, with--are they called chads in this context too?--real holes in the dust cover, and the holes peek through to the image on the cover board itself, the face of Alan Turing. But the aspect I love is the way the punches also, to me at least, evoke the cathedral of the title--or if not a classic Gothic cathedral then a starker medieval fortress, with slits for windows distributed across a stone face. I'm not even sure what that connection specifically means: perhaps just a sense, cutting across history, of the mystery and impersonal beauty of human ambition.

It was hardly a surprise to hear that the cover is by Peter Mendelsund, the celebrated young Knopf and Pantheon designer who was one of those fascinating people I got to interview back at Amazon (though not in person).

And the book itself I came away with a hunger to read. My friend John said it sounded like the equivalent on the computer side of Richard Rhodes's Making of the Atomic Bomb (another book I'd love to finally get to): in both cases there is a thoroughly dramatic story of breathtaking scientific breakthroughs being engineered into practical, world-changing applications by outsized personalities, in large part under the urgency of world war. And of course there was a lot of overlap between the two projects (and those who worked on them), though the weight of the computing story falls more heavily after the war.

What fascinated John (a developer himself) was the way that artificial intelligence seemed nearly invented from scratch by these thinkers, and what fascinated me was the idea, which Dyson raised, that the path our computers took (which I don't know enough about to even define) was just one of many possible ones, and that what looked like parallel dead ends to that path may yet have potential as future breakthroughs.

And what I enjoyed about the evening was a sort of familial sense about it all. Dyson obviously comes from a family of scientists and technologists (he grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where much of his story is set), and since he's lived in the Seattle area for decades he knew a lot of people at the reading, but in a larger sense there was a feeling in the room, based both on the heads I saw nodding at various points in his story and on the questions (often really statements with question marks) at the end, that many of the people there had personal connections to various aspects of his story: to the technology, or to the people themselves. And that sense echoed Dyson's approach to the subject, which seems as interested in the personal stories of the scientists (and engineers and secretaries) who worked on these breakthroughs as in the technology itself. It was a reminder that the story of technology is as human a story as any.

I also appreciated, when so much of what I read (and write) is both produced and consumed in bite-sized morsels, hearing from someone who has been devoted to a project for years and years (he said he turned in the book about six years past his publisher's original deadline). The Town Hall site has a video of a similar talk Dyson gave at Google a few years back, while still in the middle of his giant project, a meandering slide-show tour through the images of his book: