Surrender

 

When I’m working on a book I don’t usually read fiction. For one, it’s a distraction. I usually read fiction analytically: how did he or she do it? Sentence length, level of detail, use of adjectives, point of view, showing and telling, story structure, how the thing moves through time, how to make survival in extremis vivid, how do codes of honor work, etc. and ad nauseum. Every aspect of the novel. Then there is style. Some stylists are deadly to a writer. I’m pretty much over unconscious imitation, but still, reading Faulkner or James or Chandler can screw me up for hours.

I also read fiction for entertainment, or to fill in a gap. The times of year I tend to do this are at Christmas and in the summer. For entertainment I’ll read Philip K. Dick or Charles Willeford, or a contemporary novel that interests me. The Secret History became an obsessive guilty pleasure one summer. I listened to it in the car going out to Minnesota and then read it in its meat form. I even considered briefly making this blogh a Donna Tartt fan site. But then, I also wanted to make it a Buffy fan site. Or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which got my back up a little (I’m sure he’s read The Man Who Can’t Die, in the alternate universe where he works in a library and I write best-selling novels). Fill in the gap books are great classics I haven’t read. There are too many of these to name. Examples from summer’s past are Buddenbrooks, Anna Karenena, Lord Jim.

This year, as I was casting about for one or another, a friend, Anna at http://www.fleurconsultancy.blogspot.com/ literally commanded me to read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. This book falls under the latter category and was perfect for what I was after. I surrendered cheerfully and thus began my summer of surrender. The next book was flung in my path by JR Lennon, at his blog: http://wardsix.blogspot.com/ . He wrote a post on his pile of Stanley Elkin books and said that I must read Stanley Elkin’s Magic Kingdom. I love Stanley Elkin. I love him because he wrote The Living End and because he is published by Dalkey Archive. Dalkey Archive publishes Ford Maddox Ford’s The March of Literature, one of my bibles, as well as Iceland by Jim Krusoe, a brief, devastationalist masterpiece and of course a many other worthy and eccentric titles.

I’m not done with Stanley Elkin’s Magic Kingdom. And I’m not sure if it is on the entertainment or hoary classic end of the spectrum. Of course, the great thing about most hoary classics is, they are very entertaining. So I do not actually have to choose here, any more than I have to choose between mind vs. body or nature vs. nurture or Vertigo vs. Rear Window. I do however fall firmly on the Stones side of The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones.

The final command came from Miette at http://www.miettecast.com/ . I e-mailed her to say that through boredom and fortuity I had run across an Englysshe translation of Ivan Cankar’s Martin Kacur, The Biography of an Idealist. Ivan Cankar  is said to be Slovenia’s greatest novelist. His dates are in my comfort zone, 1876-1918. These are the glory years of the novel, when it was at the height of its power, and his influences and intentions and milieu are those that fascinate me most. Really, as a novelist I have the ambition to write as they did then about our world. As a writer he took up and rejected realism, symbolism, mysticism, idealism, nationalism and socialism. His intentions are analytic and satirical, he is described as ‘ruthless’ in his portrayal of provincial small mindedness as well the abuses and hypocrisy of the powerful; his milieu is Central Europe. Cankar is considered to be the father of Slovenian modernism, and the list of his isms, as well as his restlessness, attest to this. It is that stew of qualities that I find so amazing, and so amazingly suited to the ability of the novel to both dramatize, through narrative, the doings of society, while also rendering the dark dreams of the inner light visible.

So this is my summer of surrender, of powerlessness. And I am enjoying it. But please, no more commands! I must return to my books on Vietnam, to Lonergan’s Insight, to Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture, to Georges Maspero’s The Champa Kingdom and to Keith Taylor’s Early Viet Nam. Oh yes, and to Ulysses….