This is an excellent biography, and it does its job of covering the events, background, and issues of Mary McCarthy’s life quite admirably.  It’s a mature, completely solid book, well aware of the biographical work that had been done on McCarthy during her lifetime and shortly afterwards, and making a substantial and significant addition to the existing record.  And of course Kiernan has an acute understanding of McCarthy’s autobiographical writing in both memoir and fictional form, which is a big part of why McCarthy is a fascinating biographical subject in the first place.  In reading The Company She Keeps and The Group (and a lot of her other fiction has just as much autobiography in it), I was always curious about the sources for the characters and scenes.  As I’ve mentioned before, David Laskin’s group biography Partisans started me on MM, but it had a different focus and didn’t provide the same kind of information.  Some of the earlier biographies, which I should cite more carefully than I will right now, presumably provide the “keys” and backgrounds, but Kieran’s interviews go a large step further and encompass the perspectives of many of the subjects and characters involved or described in MM’s writing.  Kiernan’s major contribution is oral history in the form of intereviews with McCarthy’s friends, contacts, enemies and admirers, which appear as small, manageable paragraphs throughout the text.  In this manner, we hear directly from people who knew MM, witnesses who can talk directly about her life, her world, and her work.

Kiernan was a longtime (15 years?) fiction editor at The New Yorker (not longtime enough that she was there when MM was publishing in the magazine, however), and since this book appeared in 2000 she has published a biography of Brook Astor.  And so it’s not surprising that in many ways this is an editor’s biography, in the best sense.  Kiernan’s accomplishment in creating a completely readable text out of innumerable documents and substantive interviews is quite impressive.  The book is 750 pages long and I read it with enthusiam over the course of a month, and finished it a couple of weeks ago.

After reading it I looked at a couple of reviews, most of which enjoyed the book and appreciated its accomplishment like I did, but one or two were mixed and skeptical of Kiernan’s effort of one or two were mixed and skeptical of Kiernan’s effort of telling the story and melding her own writing with the quoted interviews.  This is subjective, I would say, but for my own part I thought that Kiernan’s writing and insights wre very fine, and well-measured in a book that manages such a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of its subject.  I note these reviews, which can be located easily enough, because I remember that one of them mentioned some other fairly recent (in 2000) biographies that had used a similar semi-oral history technique.  One fo them was a book about Edie Sidgwick, I believe.  All this seems worth mentioning because Kiernan’s approach to the writing of biography appears to be part of an evolution, perhaps minor, in form.  Interviews and oral history have always been a part of contemporary or semi-contempoary biography, and perhaps it’s only notable here because of the somewhat stark appearance of quoted material in the text.  But for me at least it was all very effective.

At any rate, Kiernan does a great job of telling the story of MM’s so very interesting life.  And Kiernan’s sustained, intelligent effort furthers the campaign to establish McCarthy’s place and importance as a mid-century writer and literary figure.  I came away with a clear sense and lots of details about MM’s life and work, and it was interesting to see the different major epochs of her life.  Over the course of reading the book I experienced a wide range of responses and levels of interest as MM moved from a difficult childhood to capturing a firm place in the midcentury New York literary and intellectual world.  But more recently, finishing it and reading about the last 20 years of her life, it became clear how she faded out just at the time that I myself began to read and study literature, answering my questions about how I had been for the most part ignorant of her and her work.  Although The Group was a spectacular bestseller, it wasn’t her best book and she wasn’t able to follow it up with a book or series of books that would have established her literary reputation at a higher level.  She wasn’t able to aim at contending to be a world-renowned writer like Iris Murdoch and Nadine Gordimer or others, and towards the end you realize that Kiernan’s book, which begins with MM’s bittersweet acceptance of a lifetime achievement medal at the MacDowell writer’s colony, is imbued at its start and finish with a melancholy ambivalence.  McCarthy is still someone who had a massive impact and her work will last, but you get the sense that distractions and difficulties and the changing times of the 60s caused her to fail to become transcendent, that she had laid the groundwork to become a George Eliot or Virginia Woolf and then didn’t make it.  This doesn’t lessen her work, and given her personality and the challenges she faced, it’s all still quite extraordinary.  With writers like GEliot and VWoolf, for instance, and certainly Jane Austen, their works transcend the interest of their interesting lives.  With a brilliant character caught up in his contemporary literary culture like Dr. Johnson, however, who obviously has the best of biographers, his life seems to transcend any of his specific works.  With a fine and thorough biography like this one, added to an already-existing set of works, it appears that McCarthy leans towards the Johnson side of the equation, which, after all, isn’t so bad.      

It’s a funny thing to bring preconceived notions to a book, and I feel like I brought a rather hefty set of baggage to Easter Parade.  In the first place, I have a ridiculously high opinion of Revolutionary Road and Yates’ insight and craftsmanship in the stories of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.  From there, I know that he turned into a wreck of sorts, and spent the 60s and most of the 70s, civil rights speeches for Bobby Kennedy aside, stumbling drunkenly towards increasing obscurity and futility.  He maintained his craftsmanship but his production was a trickle, and he never came close to finding an audience.  And then he went on a surprising late run and turned out a few more books in his last years, none of them as accomplished as RevRoad, but not unworthy, just not anything that would generate a breakthrough to wider recognition and fortune.  And the general idea is that Easter Parade is the most solid and satisfying of Yates’ later work, so it seemed to be a good place to continue reading him.

So I think it might have been this “baggage” that made me think of EP as rather slight, having a persistent notion that it was never going to measure up to RevRoad or amount to much.  But in considering it now, this “slightness” and lack of heft are odd entryways to anything Yates might put his stamp on.  The slightness is there initially in Easter Parade, as we move quickly through the childhood, early loves and lives of sisters Sarah and Emily, and it takes the form of accessibility.  The story here isn’t going to be a tumultuous year that ends in death and despair (as in RevRoad), but it will instead be a midcentury panorama, two sisters coming of age just after WW2 and pursuing contrasting paths through adulthood in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  The story moves along, but one can’t call it brisk or bracing, and it is anything but breezy.  The term that seems to capture the general impression created by Yates is devastation, which of course hardly melds with slightness or accessibility, but perhaps that just shows the deft touch of the master.  Yates sets up fully rounded characters with telling details and bits of aspiration and flawed self-knowledge, and then he goes on to show how American lives are essentially empty and hopeless, employing a scorched earth policy towards any sort of ambition or fulfillment.  So that makes Easter Parade relatively “slight” somehow in its absolute devastation and gathering, inexorable pessimism.  So be it.

Upon reflection, interesting elements abound in EP.  The sibling relationship stands out and is quite complex, an extremely sophisticated equation, and it is deepened by the fact that we’re watching two women navigate the postwar evolution of women’s roles.  And like so many women of that generation, both of them turn out to be wildly unsuccessful.  The younger daughter Emily provides the primary perspective of the novel, and she is knowing and skeptical as her sister marries a handsome semi-engineer with loutish tendencies, who turns into an abusive, blue collar machinist.  Emily provides a working girl’s jaundiced view of her sister’s mediocre, tawdry surburban domesticity.  Sarah’s despair is fueled by increasingly chronic alcoholism as the years go by.   Yates should be given a lot of credit for turning his unsparing eye towards domestic violence in 1976.  Even though the women’s movement was in full flower at that point, my own subjective sense (graduating high school at the time) is that domestic violence hadn’t entered the national discussion quite yet.  And Yates shows that angry, frustrated drunken men were routinely beating the shit out of their wives, hidden in the shadows of the American dream.

All of this is of course horrifying from Emily’s point of view.  Emily has gone to college and learned to read and write and edit.  But she never quite gets a foothold in either a career or in relationships.  Her independence seems to doom her somehow to bittersweet, unsatisfying romantic choices.  She has more variety than her sister, but little or nothing to show for it in the end.  She’s never in a truly bad job or horrible relationship, but she’s never in a good one either.  Her superiority over Sarah sustains her, and it is only after Sarah is drunk, disfigured, dead and gone that Emily falls apart and loses everything.

The sisters’ dark fate is determined by their parents, divorced when Emily is a small child.  Their dreamy, impractical mother and patient, detached, and impossibly distant father are rather obviously modeled after Yates’ own parents, and the strength of the autobiographical scenes, details, and characters comes across very directly.  But there’s an important twist, as Yates’ is telling his sister’s story, more or less, through Sarah, while Emily stands in for his own role in his dark family drama.  This allows him to work a few intriguing changes on the facts.  Emily’s relationship with and rejection of her mother is a bit less fraught than it might have been in real life, and the Oedipal conflicts are well-avoided in the novel, but the relationship of the sisters becomes deeper and more interesting because of their contrasting viewpoints.  And at the same time, in a neat sleight of hand, it seems as if Yates is able to dig even further into autobiographical details and truths by giving a couple of Emily’s lovers problematic characteristics that seem to describe Yates himself.  The mid-section of the book is a careful dissection of Emily’s relationship when she moves to the Iowa writer’s workshop with a blocked, self-pitying, hopeless poet, author of a couple of brilliant early collections, who knows he’s become a hack who can’t do anything right.  So we see Yates folded in upon himself somehow, his despair and rejection doubled and shown from both inside and outside, masculine and feminine at once.  It’s an expertly turned, neat trick, exquisite craftsmanship, and even stronger when it’s seen as setting up the third part of the book, which I described before as a sort of Sherman’s march through the life of first Sarah and then Emily.

Yates, growing old, gives just a slight hint of redemption at the very end of the novel.  Sarah and her abusive husband have produced two unremarkable sons, but they have a third child, Peter, who has a spiritual bent and becomes a 70’s era, slightly alternative clergyman.  As Emily declines into complete isolation and careens towards starvation and death, she manages to make her way to Peter, and she becomes completely unhinged at the moment of her arrival, spewing invective in the same way her mother did years before.  But Peter is calm, tolerant and understanding, seemingly prepared to accept her at her worst and still usher her in comfort to her end.  As odd as it is to find a religious figure at the end of one of Yates’ books, it is done with swift assurance, in a simple way with a lack of sentiment.  From a realist standpoint, it seems to say that given enough tries, one child might just find peace and be able to ease some of the suffering that marks the family.  Emily surrenders herself to his care, with her final thought a realization, appropriate enough to this blog, that she has ”understood nothing.”

I’m left with the sense that Yates’ work will withstand the most careful and thoughtful academic treatment, and he deserves the best commentary that can be mustered.  One final thing I’d like to mention is the short lifespan that is shown in the two novels that I’ve read.  In RevRoad April Wheeler, a frustrated young mother, can’t conceive of a future and ends her own life.  In Easter Parade adulthood is soaked in alcohol, brutish, and short, and somehow Sarah and Emily’s lives seem long and full of yearning, but they’re both wiped out and finished before they turn 50.  Just making it to 50 is more than enough time to live with the pain of Yates’ world, where there is no such thing as a sobering thought, only drunken, depressed, and honest ones.        

It turned out to be pretty easy for me to finally finish this book.  The problem is that it was sitting on the shelf for too long, and now the last two or three chapters, which I read last week, are fairly clear in my head, while the meat of the book is rather vague.  I did the heavy lifting on this book back in February when I was writing up a connection between Schreiner and Virginia Woolf, and I might have started it before that.  At any rate, Schreiner’s life itself is somewhat abbreviated, so that in the part I just read the book moves briskly towards its conclusion.  I think I had just passed through the tougher, reading the details of her life from the onset of the Boer War (called something else now?  see, I don’t even remember that) to WWI, all of it more political and feminist that literary.  It would have been better to have finished the book and written about it a few months ago, just as I wish I had written a post about African Farm even though I read it just before I started the blog, but I’ll leave all that aside.

But at least it’s very timely within the context of my last post, about reading the biographies of woman authors.  Olive Schreiner is in many ways a fantastic test case.  But let me go back towards the beginning.  My blog here needs to be better organized, but I’ve just gone back to read my earlier post, and I might as well link to it:   http://zhiv.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/olive-schreiner-and-virginia-woolf/  Can’t say that I’m very happy with that post, which does more than its share of meandering.  At the time “The Story of an African Farm” was fresher in my head, and you do get some sense of the impact it had.  Today, I would leave it at the fact that I heartily recommended the book, and point out its special status as a touchstone for South African literature, a great introductory text to reading Gordimer, for instance.

Olive Schreiner was an extraordinary woman and writer.  She wrote her great book at a very early age, and it’s as if she was possessed by a literary spirit.  She grew up isolated and friendless, sent to foster families and school and separated from her impoverished missionary parents, losing her faith and becoming an ardent freethinker at a young age.  It was a rich late Victorian mixture, very much a singular literary flower blooming in the vast and trackless bush.  Schreiner saved her money and scraped by, while her beauty and vivacity made her life romantic, colorful, and complicated.  While still a 19-year-old, for instance, she was living in a tent at the diamond fields with her brother, and finishing a draft of her novel.  Schreiner finally made it to England some years later, and she was 26 when her book was published and she became a sensation.   She took the occasion to make political connections with socialists and freethinkers who were sympathetic to the progressive and feminist themes of her book.

I’m remembering all of this off the top of my head.  The gist of it is that Schreiner managed a magnificent accomplishment, became a minor celebrity, and she was a passionate and influential figure in an early period of socialism and feminism.  And as much as she had ample charisma and was a strong, original thinker, she simply wasn’t able to exist very comfortably in society and she was never able to fulfill the promise of her early work.  Stuff I’ve been looking at recently, the examples of Richard Yates and F. Scott Fitzgerald, infamously squandering early talent in alcoholism and dissipation (whenever I see the word ”dissipation,” I think of FSF and reading about him almost 30 years ago), is very similar, but Schreiner presents a different, and specifically female case.  She was faced with trying to figure out how to live and work and find someone to love, and her commitment to being self-supporting made her personal life more complex.  She ultimately married a rather rugged South African, Samuel Cronright, who published a biography and edition of her letters after her death, and she also lost a baby.  She had periods of happiness and influence, but she was asthmatic and nervous and sickly, and she never came close to building a sustained literary career.  Nevertheless, she seems to have understood the world, the role of women, and the complex political evolution of South Africa in a prescient way.  She was a radical, but in the last chapters of this biography, the authors do a good job of connecting her feminism to labor questions and race relations in South Africa, and it sometimes seems as if Schreiner, with the deep socialist connections she made in England, virtually stood alone as she watched South Africa move in exactly the opposite direction of her own convictions, and her sympathy for the native Africans and understanding of their political role grew and grew over time.

This biography isn’t so extraordinary in its writing, but that’s somewhat deceptive.  In some ways it’s a great work because it combines literary, historical, political, and feminist elements so well.  Part of this is the natural interest of the life of Schreiner herself, who is truly one of a kind, and an important writer in the English literary canon who is completely instinctual and self-taught, creating a colonial and provincial feminist voice all on her own.  The book already takes on added dimension of importance when one remembers what late-70s South Africa was like, as First and Scott were writing it.  This book becomes a truly extraordinary work when one learns about the co-author Ruth First, and the study of First’s life can unfold in a similar fashion to learning about Schreiner.  

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/ruthfirst.html

When I first brought home this book, probably in November, just after reading African Farm, I showed it to my daughter, deep into her South Africa studies, who immediately said “Ruth First?!  She was married to Joe Slovo, they were in law school with Mandela.  She was killed by a letter bomb!”  First was a critical figure in South African politics from the early 50s.  She had already written a number of books and she and her husband were living with their family in exile in London when she teamed up with feminist scholar Ann Scott.  The biography was published in 1980, and two years later First moved to Mozambique, where she was indeed killed by a letter bomb.  Her daughter Shawn Slovo told her version of growing up with her mother, the revolutionary activist, in the film “A World Apart,” directed by Chris Menges. 

There’s some more digging to be done here, and I’d like to watch the movie.  First and Scott aren’t especially present in the text, but you can understand the fascination with Schreiner.  As there’s no mention of the Schreiner biography in brief netbios of First, and as some one who had Barbara Hershey playing her in a movie, she’ll be remembered for her own place in South African history, not for her work on Schreiner.  You just don’t see this type of confluence in literary history, but I’ve found that South Africa and its literature are full of surprises.  The fact that this extraordinary woman was able to write such a solid and insightful biography of Schreiner, bringing her accomplishments and story to light, says a lot in itself.  African Farm is well worth reading, and First and Scott’s biography of Schreiner is a great, valuable book for all sorts of different reasons. 

My copy of the Richard Yates biography, A Tragic Honesty, by Blake Bailey, finally came yesterday.  Handsome book.  I had to reorder it and have been waiting for it for awhile, and I remembered that I made a vow not to start it until I had finished Ruth First and Ann Scott’s biography of Olive Schreiner.  That of course didn’t stop me from wading into the deep waters of Frances Kiernan’s Seeing Mary Plain, as I’ve mentioned.  Remembering all this, this morning I checked and saw that I have 80 pages to go in the Schreiner, and I settled in for ten minutes and finished the “A Lady of Letters” chapter in Kiernan, which has MM married to 4th husband James West, turning 50, having just written her last short story (apparently quite good), living in Paris, and about to finish and publish The Group, which is the title of the next chapter.  Should be interesting to see if I can resist Bailey’s Yates and finish the Schreiner and Kiernan’s SMP first.  I doubt it.  It’s not at all unusual for me to be reading 10 books at once.

All of this, and a note about Salem, Mass. over at Dorothy’s Of Books and Bikes, made me want to reflect for a moment on literary biography and some women authors.  I love literary biography.  I could go deeper into it, but I’ll throw out a few broad strokes about my own habits.  When I find an author, and Schreiner, Yates, and McCarthy are all good recent examples, I like to read their work first, as far it goes, but within moments I’m curious about their lives and background.  I don’t really like to ”cheat,” because I want to form my own impression of the author’s work and style and my own sense of their accomplishment in the ”vacuum of the text,” if you want to call it that.  So I would read RevRoad and some Yates stories before getting too many biographical details, and I mentioned how I wanted to read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood before getting to Kiernan’s version of those biographical events.  But as I say, it only goes so far.  I’m wasn’t going to read all of McCarthy’s other works before reading the biography, and I don’t know that I’ll read Easter Parade, for instance, before diving into Bailey’s biography of Yates, although I feel like I probably should (and I might, dammit!).  And I might add here that the other thing I like to do is gather up copies of these other books, so I already have a tidy little Yates collection, and the MM collection is fairly substantial, and very fun to gather.

But my main objective today is to mention some of my favorite biographies of women authors.  Or at least, sort of women authors.  Over at Dorothy’s site I just wrote a note about Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters, which I read about 18 months ago, I think, and that was just a great, revelatory book, that is a wonderful example of literary scholarship and biographical writing.  Marshall published a tantalizing excerpt in The New Yorker called “The Other Sister,” and the book was simultaneously published to some acclaim and recognition.  One of the things I really liked about it was its form as a family biography, not unlike the ”group biography” that I wrote about in David Laskin’s Partisans, which is the book that put me on the McCarthy path.  Marshall’s book combines the illumination of an important, even central character who has been quite neglected, in Elizabeth Peabody, with an extended new perspective on an American literary titan, Hawthorne.  It was a great story and a great read, and it’s highly recommended.

Another book I want to note as one of my favorites isn’t about a woman author per se, and I guess it isn’t a biography either, but since she wrote it herself that has to count somehow.  For years I’ve felt that Katharine Graham’s autobiography, Personal History, is one of the best and most compelling books I’ve ever read, and I thought it would be worth noting here, especially as I read about McCarthy, who is a close contemporary of hers, I believe.  The story itself is simply amazing, and one of the most interesting things is that it has genuine historical import.  It seems as if Graham is fairly well-known now, settling into her place in history, and this Pulitzer-winning book certainly helped the cause.  Even though I might have read it more than a decade ago, I can make a number of immediate connections with this book to my present concerns.  It slightly predates the late century memoir explosion, but it deserves to be included in a discussion or course on 20th century memoir and autobiography, which is of course McCarthy territory in a major way.  And this gives me a chance to mention how I was studying and writing about the intersected lives of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote last fall.  When Warhol first moved to New York, he basically stalked Capote.  This was briefly referenced in Ken Burns’ Warhol documentary, and it was fun to track down the timeline and details in the Capote biography that led to the movie, and elsewhere, and studying early, pre-In Cold Blood Capote as well as 50s Warhol was fascinating.  But my first real interest in Capote, aside from vague knowledge, came from reading the Graham book and its discussion of the “party of the century” where she was his guest of honor.  I’ll finish by throwing out another one of my (hopefully rare) movie notes.  Uber-producer Laura Ziskin (Spiderman, Pretty Woman, etc) has owned the movie rights to the book for years, at HBO I believe.  In the first place, this is the perfect Meryl Streep Oscar-winner of all time–it would be virtually impossible to mess it up.  But even better and truly exciting, I’ve always thought, would be to do the movie version of the Katharine Graham story as a female Citizen Kane, imbuing the whole movie with references to one of the ultimate classic films.  If you know the story and the book, you get it.  I’m just saying.

As long as I’ve mentioned movies, I’ll nod at another biography:  Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman, which is going to appear in September (bad release date) as ”The Duchess,” with litstar Keira Knightley.  If you like the 18th century, this is a really good read, very well done, and the Duchess is a great character.  I read it years ago, shortly after it came out, and I give people credit for getting it made as a film.   Nothing to suggest that the movie will be anything special, and it’s getting the “Silk” treatment rather than “Atonement” (does anybody know anybody who saw Silk?), but we’ll see.  But if anybody out there likes to read books before they appear as movies, add this one to the list.

Lastly, there’s Schreiner, which I have to get back to.  I’ve been drifting away from the Africa books, after a fascinating and fun “senior honors project” year with the GD, but I want to finish this, and my “paper”/essay on OS and Virginia Woolf as well.  Schreiner’s book had a big impact on me back in the fall, and it would be nice to get back to it and write about her a little bit more. 

The larger question here, I suppose, is the gender issue, taking a look at these women and their lives and accomplishments and glancing to see how they’re distinctive and particularly feminine.  David Laskin, in Partisans, spends a lot of time talking about McCarthy’s pre-feminist approach, but it hasn’t been much of an issue in Kiernan’s book.  I don’t have any off the cuff deep thoughts about these women or these books and what it all means.  I guess all I know, at the moment, is that these are books that I have enjoyed and am enjoying, both for their subjects and for themselves.  I’m sure there are countless other solid and enjoyable literary biographies of women out there, but this is a place for me, at least, to begin to do some  thinking about this particular category. 

  

So I’ll give the May Mary McCarthy rundown.  We left off, I think, when I had started reading Frances Kiernan’s year 2000 biography, “Seeing Mary Plain,” published by Norton, but I was trying to finish Memories of a Catholic Girlhood before I got to those parts in the biography.  Finished MoaCG quite a while ago, and I guess I’ve been reading Kiernan’s book for most of the last month. 

Reviewing in the broadest of strokes, MoaCG is an excellent work of literature.  My basic experience reading it was that I wasn’t especially impressed by the first essays, perhaps because my expectations were quite high.  I was highly curious to unravel the mystery of MM’s early life in Minnesota, after her parents had died in the flu epidemic.  The story of evil guardians and an extended desolate period during childhood must have had its impact at the time, not unlike the way that ”Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit” had its shock value.  But the first stories weren’t especially suggestive to me for some reason.  I was impressed by the precision of the writing, and I always like to see unique words that jump out that I never use or have barely seen in my reading, and there were at least four or five of these in the first 100 pages.  By that time, the book had picked up and become more solid and engaging, and the last essays, “Yellowstone Park” and “Ask Me No Questions,” were especially good.  Lastly, I’ll mention that, as a collection of essays that were published in The New Yorker over the course of a number of years, MM includes her own later commentary, which is all rather “meta,” but it was published around the same time as Pale Fire, so it’s not shocking stuff.  And there is a progression in MM’s depth and ability as an essayist and writer as she moves through the years.  When she reaches “Ask Me No Questions” and considers the life of her Jewish grandmother, she is delving into meaty material that was crucial to her personality and identity.

I also read through most of the late “Intellectual Memoirs:  New York 1936-1938,” published from a manuscript in 1992, which was filling in stuff that, for me, Kiernan had been talking about already.  It was still good, but it has been lost in the deep seas of Kiernan’s excellent and exhaustive account.   The commentary/autobiography of Intellectual Memoirs didn’t have the same shape and structure as MoaCG, and this shows that the structure of essays about distinct elements may have been more effective somehow–something that is true, oddly enough, of The Company She Keeps.

Kiernan, who was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for a long time (15 years), is a very keen McCarthy expert, and she has written an extraordinary biography.  McCarthy is a great subject, first of all, with all of her self-drama, intelligence, and accomplishment.  But Kiernan has made a step forward, it seems, in the form of literary biography.  I’m sure that others have done this in some manner before, but she includes direct accounts from a large number of sources in her text.  It’s almost Boswellian, and I would be curious to hear about other contemporary biographies that have used the same technique, but I would be surprised to see any that have done it so effectively or seamlessly.  The first person accounts and the many direct quotations might seem to detract from Kiernan’s own narrative and sparing observations, but those are also solid and quite acute.  Sometimes the story is being told directly, and at other times Kiernan is seems to have a gentle hold on the tiller of the narrative while we read the voices of the many people who knew McCarthy.  Again, in the end MM is just a great biographical subject, it seems, but I would highly recommend Kiernan’s biography to anyone like me who has found Mary McCarthy rather late in the game, reading her now as a rather neglected midcentury writer.  I’m approaching page 500 of Kiernan’s book, and have been enjoying every page, but I’ll be interested to see the conclusions that she reaches in the end.  Continuing, I might want to write about some of the episodes of MM’s life itself.  But I just wanted to try to build some momentum after the long dry spell…     

Yeah, what can I say?  May was just a bad blogging month.  Not even sure what the excuses might be.  My daughter graduated from high school on Thursday, so there’s that.  The new job went through some serious growing pains but seems to have straightened itself out, bringing with it approximately a 2000% decrease in internet time.  And I should add that it feels like I’ve been reading along pretty steadily over the past three weeks or so, although I’ve probably slowed down a fair amount.  The sad part is that the books that I’ve finished and still need to write about are the same ones that were in the bank when I did my last post, three weeks ago.

I’ll mention something else.  I think I was freaked out by Dewitt Henry making an appearance in the comments of this blog, generously noting his appreciation for my posts on Richard Yates.  From what I can tell, Henry is one of the original Yates cognoscenti.  When I was in the first throes of my Yates fever I printed a bunch of stuff up off the very good but sleepy Yates website, RichardYates.org, including the somewhat well-known Stewart O’Nan essay.  In the packet was an interview of Yates from Ploughshares, and it turns out that DeWitt Henry was the interviewer, and the founding editor of Ploughshares.  Henry may have had a legitimate dual purpose, sending out appreciation while looking for a sympathetic reader of his own new book.  I had immediate visions of entering the world of criticism and literary journals along this avenue, continuing to blog and reading Henry’s Father-Daughter book along with his new book, and I spent a long internet session using links on the Ploughshares or some other journal’s website, looking through a number of these literary publications.  But in the end, not surprisingly, this zhiver zhived it, and I did nothing.  My biggest regret is that I haven’t managed to order Henry’s books yet.  But maybe these notes will cause me to get around to it.

But I will say, getting back to notes, that taking a look at Yates through Dewitt Henry is a great way to go further into the great writer and the great book.  As recommended above, RichardYates.org is a great place to start.  And right there, in the news section, are remarks by Henry about Yates’ technique: 

 http://www.richardyates.org/bib_henry.html

I thought that this was extremely well-done, even revelatory, as in “oh, so that’s how you write a great story or novel.”  I read this a couple of weeks ago, and I suppose I should say that it didn’t exactly cause me to speed up in setting down my own thoughts on Yates’ stories. 

Other readers of Revolutionary Road are trickling in.  An old friend/TV writer took it Cabo on vacation and was blown away by it.  I’m finding more and more people who have read it over the past few years, and every single one says, yeah, that was a great book.  Blogger Verbivore snuck it in just before going on vacation, and I thought her post was excellent, and not because she mentioned my own nudge in recommending it: 

http://incurablelogophilia.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/richard-yates-revolutionary-road/

It looks like I’m going to have to do this catch-up in pieces, heading off to yoga and Sunday now.  Lots of notes and thoughts on Mary McCarthy to come, and we’ll see what else is out there.  Am hoping that a quick note like this can break the log jam.  We’ll see.

Struggling a little bit, trying to read and write and angle the new job and all the rest.  Moving along, but not quite over the hump with any really good postable material.  Here are the areas of focus:

Richard Yates.  I think I’ve given away 5 copies of Revolutionary Road now, and it’s about time to check in on everybody who is reading it.  I got my half.com account going and did a little Yates blitz, so the biography is going to show up any day.  I already received a pristine copy of Easter Parade, which seems like it’s too nice to read, but the GD needs a book so I may let her go at it first.  She gulped down Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, partly just because it had a character reference to RR in it, but she has read NH before and liked the book.  At any rate, I was on a modest schedule of reading Yates’ stories, and realized that I had finished all of the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, so I want to do a thoughtful and sustained post on that book, but just haven’t found the right moment.  The stories are all completely solid and enlightening in terms of the larger Yates enterprise, and they throw occasional flashes of light at what he was doing in Rev Road. 

With Yates in mind, I also pulled a Fitzgerald volume down off the shelf and read the short story “The Adjuster,” and it was a good choice, as it showed how FSF really was a master of what might be called the American dilemma, in his own way.  Lots of FSF to be read here in mid-life (which he never quite made it to), and lots to say about that over time, I would guess.  It’s interesting to see how an author’s work can change so radically from a different perspective, how Yates was seeing something in FSF that so many others might have been missing, while I had my own entry-level young guy perspective when I was reading it the first time.

Mary McCarthy.  Spending most of my time on MM.  Couldn’t break through and get into Gordimer, read a little bit of the Olive Schreiner biography I’m trying to finish, but none of that was really getting me going.  Same with trying to take a shot at Madame Bovary.  But instead of all that, I’ve been happily meandering through the next step on MM, and am almost done with Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.  So my next posts, when I get around to them, will be on the Yates stories and MM’s memoir.  I’m also reading the most recent MM biography, Seeing Mary Plain, by a former New Yorker fiction editor, which seems to be outstanding, but I’m moving around in it a little bit and trying not to get ahead of MM’s own memoir.  So I read the first chapter, which is about MM accepting an award at a writer’s colony late in life (great stuff), and then the Vassar and New York beginnings chapter, interested to see how it talks about the stuff behind The Group, and The Company She Keeps, all of it quite interesting.

That’s the update.  I’ve done a little bookshopping (and looking), and wanted to mention that at Borders I saw not one but two fairly recent editions of the book from my last post, Jewett’s The Country Doctor.  I wanted to sit down and read the introductions, but it was good to see that the book is out there and being read and taught.

I was saying the other day that Sarah Orne Jewett may have been at the end of the run of “domestic fiction,” or right in the middle of it, I wasn’t sure.  This very good book, which I would only recommend if you like the slow and quiet depth of Pointed Firs, seems to go right to the heart of the question.  And the answer is no, not domestic fiction, thank you very much.

TCD tells the story of Nan Prince.  It is a bildungsroman of sorts, although a quick glance at a book of Jewett criticism, “American Persephone,” that was lying around, gives me a hint that a female bildungsroman is somewhat complicated by its very nature.  (I really didn’t want to read any criticism before writing this, but kind of kept leaping around for a bit.)  It’s divided into two parts:  Nan’s infancy and childhood, and then her young adulthood.  In the first part, the book opens with Nan’s mother struggling and stumbling to return to her small-town farm home, barely alive, a last shred of maternal instinct enabling her to keep herself from jumping in the river with her baby, and she makes it to her mother’s house to die, the baby safe.  We’re introduced to the local doctor, Dr. Leslie, a quiet, refined, dedicated paragon and intellectual, who eases Nan’s mother’s death and promises to watch over her baby.  It’s all an engaging, dramatic early set of chapters and scenes, introducing a simple and very human New England world, with a promising set of characters.

Nan’s spends her early childhood on the bucolic farm with her old, well-meaning grandmother, and after her death she becomes the ward of Dr. Leslie.  His own wife and child had died before the story begins, and Nan brings added life and interest into the world of a busy man who seems to hold a widespread community together with a gentle touch.  Jewett does a nice job of capturing this world, the charms of its setting and its simple virtues.  Her technique is more direct, and less measured and evocative than in Pointed Firs, which is a masterwork in this regard, but in this earlier effort, more than a decade prior, you can feel the warm, gentle touch she has for her world and its rhythms.

Living with Dr. Leslie, in a kind of idyllic guardian-ward relationship that takes away some of the father-daughter sting that might imply a rejection of the mother (who was killed off, right up front), Nan develops an ambition to follow in his footsteps as a doctor.  The teenage and early enthusiasms for this goal are handled with extreme care by Jewett, and she bolsters up what turns into an extra firm commitment to medicine for Nan, because she is proposing a rather radical idea, and this is where she marks a firm departure from domestic fiction and ventures into proto-feminism.  It’s all good stuff, and of course we’re happy to see such things in latter days, and you can get a sense of the struggles of women pioneers.

In the second half of the book, Nan’s vocation gets tested out in the world–sort of.  Rather than testing her mettle in the sickrooms or hospital, Jewett instead plunges her into the world of, basically, the novel, showing how ”society” views her choice and seeing if she will stand firm.  Nan’s mother, a troubled, impulsive woman from simple stock, had married above her, to a young doctor who was rejected after his poor choice by his affluent family, and his ship captain father.  Thinking about it, I didn’t really notice that Nan’s father, dead before the story begins, had been a doctor, and the fact is probably there to show that she comes by her medical interest naturally, and it’s not all because of Dr. Leslie.  The father had a sister, another Nan Prince (a bit confusing at times), who offered assistance at little Nan’s birth, but had a very prideful reaction to the choice made that Nan would stay with her mother’s “people.”  Nan has grown up quite curious about her aunt, and when she has been in medical school for a couple of years she decides to visit her.  The aunt, worried, worn, and anxious, is immediately won over by Nan and overjoyed that her lost niece has appeared in her life.  She quickly introduces Nan to the society of her own small seaport town, and almost immediately forms plans for her future happiness.   Nan the elder has a sort of ward of her own, a young lawyer who looked to be on his way to inherit her estate, and the elder decides that young Nan should get married to the nice, handsome, somewhat industrious lawyer.  The planning is all done carefully and patiently, with none of the small intrigues of a Jane Austen novel.  Jewett has presented the characters and conclusion for a very pretty piece of domestic fiction, but means to turn it on its head.  Nan the elder and the rest of the town are dismayed when they discover Nan’s folly of studying medicine.  They move ahead with their plans, expecting her to be swayed by luxury, ease, and romance.  Nan battles along bravely, never becoming strident in her arguments for selfhood, but she is tested when she discovers that she has real feelings for Mr. Gerry, the lawyer.  But she decides her rare talent and sense of duty should not be denied, and she turns him down and returns home to Dr. Leslie, and in the end looks forward to her future as a doctor.

All of this, on the whole, is very impressive, especially for 1884.  Yes, it would be nice if a character like Nan could be a doctor and still have a relationship, get married if she wants, and create a more balanced life and role for herself.  The story has something of a polemical nature, however, and the arguments about women’s roles and vocation are philosophical and carefully crafted, without overwhelming the story, and the all-or-nothing approach and making a commitment to professionalism and equality foremost has its logic and shouldn’t be slighted. 

There’s a lot going on in this book, and when you consider its quietly determined revolutionary daring, it stands fairly strong on its own while it also enriches and deepens an appreciation of the accomplishment of Pointed Firs.  One thing that comes through very strongly is the idea that Nan’s serious ambition and sense of duty all stand neatly for Jewett’s own commitment to writing, and the lonely high calling of the woman writer.  Jewett has also crafted and transformed autobiographical materials, with Dr. Leslie drawn from her doctor father, and Nan’s medical interest and enthusiasms taken Jewett’s own youthful desire to be a doctor.  She paints a careful, loving but very serious portrait of the profession of medicine, drawing a timeline that stretches far across its evolution in the 19th century, and which, in Nan’s character, looks bravely into the future.  Jewett wasn’t quite Chekhov, but she was hanging out in the same neighborhood, and as a woman she did her share of forward-thinking and then some. 

Twice in the book Jewett gives us the same “sweet nothing” that is the lifeblood of this blog:  “It is only those who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and Nan was no idler…”  By the time Jewett wrote her masterpiece, Pointed Firs, a novel without story or conflict, a book about nothing, about an idler writer, sure of herself, who goes beyond ambition to discover the rhythms of life and female mysteries, it seems that she had embraced the Core Philosophy and read more deeply into this statement, that yes, only those who can do nothing find nothing to do.        

           

I’m home sick with a cold that turned into a significant ear infection, so I figure it’s not a bad time to do a little blog housekeeping.  Just some thoughts, what I’m reading, make a few connections, general stuff.

What I’m reading #1:  A Country Doctor, by Sarah Orne Jewett.  Last spring, over a year ago, I read “Country of the Pointed Firs” when I took a New England college tour with the GD, and I found it surprisingly engaging and satisfying.  It’s a bit odd, tough guy that I am (not), but I’ve had a great time over the past 18 months reading Cather, Jewett, and Olive Schreiner for the first time.  I have a vague memory of them being mentioned and discussed back when I was in grad school in 80s and they were all in the midst of a recovery of sorts; it seems like there were plenty of people reading these authors and working on them. 

This reminds me:  I glanced at the entry under “domestic fiction” in the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the US (a nice title to have in the Tough Guy Library, don’t you think?), and saw that it said:  “While such early works as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, The Coquette by Hannah Foster, and even Anne Brandstreet’s poetry can be seen to contain elements of the genre, the novel that best marks the first full articulation of the form was A New England Tale (1822), by Catharine Sedgwick…”  Who knew?  I have to go back and read over my post on ANET.

But back to Jewett, which doesn’t seem so far from domestic fiction by any means, and it’s probably a later version of the pure stuff.  So I guess what I was starting to get at, a moment ago, is that I was vaguely aware of Pointed Firs and African Farm in graduate school when I was studying the novel, but I never made it that far, and I was reading a lot more BritLit than American.  I like all of these writers quite a lot, and I remember being freaked out at the power and importance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when I first read it over 10 years ago.  I thought that Pointed Firs was really quite good, and Jewett’s story and her Maine homeland are all good stuff.  I’ve had my eye out for Jewett stuff, not really searching too hard, but I saw a nice paperback of A Country Doctor about a month ago.  I was a little surprised to see it, but I grabbed it.  I would say that it was up next on my vacation reading list at the end of last month, but I shoved Mary McCarthy’s TCSK in there.  After I finish this long rambling post I plan to go up and head towards the finish of Country Doctor, so I’ll be writing about it soon.

What I’m reading #2:  I read the first few stories in Richard Yates’ 11 Kinds of Loneliness, reading from my copy of the Collected Stories, actually.  I’m probably going to take them slowly, and my guess is that my next Yates book will be Easter Parade.  I need to get my copy of the Yates biography too–that should be pretty exciting.  The stories are excellent, as expected, but I’ve just taken my first sip.  After all of the talk about Yates and Fitzgerald and Flaubert, I saw a copy of Madame Bovary on the shelf and I took it upstairs to put on the stack.  This morning I read the first chapter, and I found it quite accessible, very much something I would be happy to dive back into and read.  It’s one of the many books that I powered through 25-30 years ago, and I believe I read The Sentimental Education as well.  I did my time with EuroLit, especially the novel, and felt like I had a handle on Flaubert and Balzac and Stendhal, not so much Hugo and Maupassant, but what I actually remember at this point is probably about 3 drops out of a big bucket. 

So in that first chapter of Madame Bovary, I was surprised to discover that the very beginning, the introduction of Charles Bovary to the schoolroom, was deeply similar to the very first, very simple Richard Yates story, Doctor Jack-o-Lantern.  Nothing too specific, but it was fun to see such a quick connection.

Two other things about Madame Bovary, which I’m not going to say that I’m “reading” just yet.  One, as I looked at it I was surprised to see that it was published in 1857.  I would have guessed late 60s-early 70s, based on those few tiny drops of memory.  Two, thinking about it, and reading in that first chapter about Charles Bovary’s medical training and his move to a small town, throws an interesting light on “The Country Doctor.”  Dontcha think?

What I’m Not Reading #1:  African Fiction.  I need to get back to the African reading challenge, which hasn’t gotten much attention as Yates, MM and others have taken up my time.  I was going to say that Country Doctor was next on my vacation read list before I ran out of time, but the truth is that Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter was ahead of it.  So that’s on my list.  I should also note that a colleague/friend gave me what looks to be a good piece of newer South African fiction (1995), The Smell of Apples by Mark Behr.  They’re making a movie out of it.  Gave it to the GD; she’s on page 54.  Also need to finish the Olive Schreiner biography, and wrap up my Virginia Woolf-Olive Schreiner essay.  So I vow to finish the Schreiner biography before I start the Yates biography, how about that.

And while I’m rambling, I’ll mention that in the Schreiner biography I first learned about Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, who was Schreiner’s buddy, a fascinating character and activist, writer, intellectual, a big time literary daughter, who apparently had a nasty end with a horrible second husband–I read about it on Wikipedia but don’t remember the details.  At any rate, I bring it up, because the 1965 Norton Critical Editon of Madame Bovary I was reading this morning was a translation by Paul de Man (infamous? not sure what’s up with his reputation at this point), a revision of Eleanor Marx’ version.  Wouldn’t have known anything about EMarx if not for Schreiner interest and studies.

What I’m reading #3:  Without mentioning much more active screenplay reading and editing work, grinding away (new job stress and issues are clearly what got me sick), I’ve read a couple of books for work, mostly kid or YA stuff.  I’ll mention Kiki Strike, by Kirsten Miller, and its recently published 2nd installment.  I thought these books were fantastic and really fun, for anybody interested in girl power and contemporary kidlit.  They’re almost at the Harry Potter level, but not quite–and what is?  My “Some Literary Blockbusters” post was meant to be a preface to writing about Kiki Strike, but I’m holding off.  There may be later developments in the Kiki Strike world.  But in “Some Literary Blockbusters” I mentioned the gang at the children’s bookstore around the corner from my house.  When I got the new job I went in there, where I had been pretty scarce since my kids have gotten older, and I asked about what they were selling and what they liked.  It was like a gang cheer, virtually as if they all cried “Kiki Strike!” in unison.  They were selling out stacks of copies and telling everybody about it; it was rather exciting.  The first book is in paperback and the second book came out in hardback in the fall, which is a good combination, and it was only a new employee/kidlit groupie who told them all about it and got them all fired up, so it’s a bit of an in-crowd.  But the books are great.

Last week I read a YA book called “Surefire” by bestseller Jack Higgins and another writer, on the lookout for a teen Bourne Identity-movie, a step up from Spy Kids and kind of like War Games, sort of.  The book was simple and straightforward and might provide a good blueprint.  Then today I finished a book called “Audrey Wait!” which was also a fun read, a novel that’s a cross between YA and chicklit about a teenager who breaks up with her obscure rocker boyfriend, who writes a huge hit about their breakup that makes her a reluctant contemporary tabloid/MTV celebutante.  It was deeply immersed in music and teens–the GD read that one in about 5 minutes over the weekend.  She inhales the stuff, and she downed the Kiki Strike books in similar quick sittings.  Continuing on the literary parenting tip, my son and I watched Richard Linklater’s Scanner Darkly over the weekend, and he’s going to read the Philip K. Dick book.  He read The Shining on vacation, and so I also got him a copy of Carrie.  He was trying to read “Red Scarf Girl,” but he got bored and started faking it, but now he’s started Seven Years in Tibet and is liking it.  He’s studying China, by the way.  He’s super smart and has read a lot of great books this year, but it’s so much harder to find books for boys, and I didn’t read at all when I was his age.  Back before the beginning of my literary tough guy days.     

4-7-08

I did a quick little run through the book blogs this afternoon, remembering that I had found a helpful and well-done Richard Yates website over the weekend.  I wanted to read the 1999 Steward ONan article I had seen linked, and do some more digging.

It’s late as I write this, 1020.  Upstairs my daughter, the GD, is reading Revolutionary Road.  She doesn’t have to be at school tomorrow until 1130, so she can stay up late reading and then read some more in the morning. 

The chase is on.  It’s an odd thing, chasing afer a literary classic that was published in 1961.  But this process and phenomenon of literary discovery is a strange thing.  The days of “discovery” of Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, and one of the most important books of the 20th century are numbered.  I’m telling you, this is crazy stuff, and a crazy time, but it’s probably just me, riding the wave of enthusiasm.  Right now, she’s on page 84, and I’m going to heat up a scone for her and make some camomile tea.  In the spirit of Yates, I’ll pour myself another glass of wine as I move things along.

In the GD’s read, Frank Wheeler has just slept with Maureen.  (update:  I’ve discovered that Maureen is played in the movie by Zoe Kazan, daughter of screenwriters Nick, son of Elia, and Robin Swicord, who are people that I know fairly well, although I don’t remember meeting Zoe.  And I was talking to Nick and Robin on Saturday night, the 5th, leaving a party, before I wrote any of this.  Weird.)  I told her to picture Mad Men, which I keep saying owes a major debt to RR, though I haven’t seen anybody making that comment.  But in my twisted ideas of being a good father, I’m trying to preserve her innocence and allow her to read the book without picturing Dicaprio and Winslet, trying to keep her safe from the virus in the few short weeks that remain.  I think Leo D. is great and he’s as good as it gets in youngish Hollywood, a real movie star and an extremely talented actor, perfect to play Frank, but the days that one can read RR and not think about Frank Wheeler as LD are over, for all practical intents and purposes. 

My humble little Richard Yates chase says something about how biographical information and other sources, like a film version of a book, can affect and heighten our experience and appreciation of authors and their work.  My first post on RR was a simple blog review, and I’m pretty happy with it in retrospect.  Then yesterday, two weeks later, I wrote about scarcity and book collecting and my growing sense of the first rumblings of what might become a significant literary phenomenon.  And now I’ve read some criticism and assessments, profiles and interviews, gaining a sense of Yates’ own story and the history of the reception.  Now I know about Blake Bailey’s biography A Tragic Honesty, and how he came to writer it.  I want to read the stories and Easter Parade and more. I want to watch the Seinfeld episode “The Jacket,” based on the fact that Larry David went out with Yates’ daughter.  These are all the types of things that I love when they go along with a great book, and you can throw in Sam Mendes and Scott Rudin and his new Oscar for a literary movie, and maybe see a little bit of my own odd Hollywood perspective.

I loved RR and read into it deeply, and now that I’ve read some commentary by very smart people, along with a couple of interviews, I don’t think I underestimated the book’s power and importance, but it seems like it may be impossible or very difficult to overestimate it.  This is such a strange thing–forgotten classic is very slowly brought back to attention by writers, a decades-long process, then becomes Big Movie.  How is it possible that all of the important writers of the early part of my reading lifetime, all of the passion and art and color and music of the writing of the 60s and 70s could be slightly diminished somehow in the sands of time by this dark and troubled American truthteller?  In my first post’s first sentence I said that the book was stunning, and the story of the man’s ultimate impact and the evolving story of his literary reception and importance will be equally stunning.  I’m ecstatic and dumbfounded at the same time.

Yates was single-minded about Fitzgerald, seeing deeply into him the same way that Fitzgerald looked into Flaubert, apparently.  The success and acclaim of Yates’ favorite book and longtime introductory canon staple The Great Gatsby is a mirage of sorts, when you think of Fitzgerald’s crack up and his devolution.  For me, growing up as an ignorant jock, with parents who could have been Yates himself or Frank and April Wheeler, by the time I got around to literature Fitzgerald was an easy entry point, and it says something that I didn’t read it until college, rather than early in high school like my daughter.

1120, time to check on her, and she’s on pg. 140, in the description of Shep Campbell’s past, heading towards his fixation on April.  This is one of my favorite parts of the book, worthy of its own deep analysis.  “It’s exactly like Mad Men,” she says.  Should I feel bad that I’ve faked her out so completely?  The funny thing is that, born in 1990, she has a deep sympathy and bond with the Romeo and Juliet Dicaprio, so she’s going to be really excited.

But she is also racing headlong into one of the purest of American tragedies.  As an American girl, does she have a deeper understanding and sympathy for April Wheeler that I never felt?  Which is not to say that April’s memory of the visit from her father was nothing less than devastating to me.  Did the prism of Mad Men, which is entertaining enough, but not especially important, somehow corrupt my own reading of the RR, as the film is bound to do for so many others?  Reading the criticism, which is mostly just informed commentary so far, the step after Fitzgerald is Madame Bovary.  This makes a lot of sense, and it feels like a discussion of Yates is a talk about the more profound depths of modern fiction. 

In my reading this afternoon, and then tonight, it takes awhile to move through Flaubert and finally come round to Chekhov and Yates, but eventually it’s there.  This is a strange thing, following along after my daughter, helping her find the trail.  Purely by chance, or maybe not, she was finishing her spring break reading of Catch-22 as I was reading RR.  She plowed through Heller’s book steadily, in a normal way, not gulping it down as she is the semi-obscure, rising masterpiece.  I’ve never read Catch-22, but I suppose I have ideas about it, but I wonder how it compares to RR.  I’ve read The Moviegoer a couple of times, but not recently, and wonder about it as well.  I could go on about the GD’s 50s-60s literary preparation, or my own recent reading of Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin and writing about Warhol and Capote.  When a young teacher at her school taught Russian lit and culture for the first time in fall 06, I pulled out the old Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky volumes and put them on the shelf beside obscure Leskov books I had culled over time.  And that fall I read Turgenev and Chekhov for the first time.  I angry at my ignorance and sloth.  I had read, but had wasted energy and the short season of absorption and focus on some odd byways.  I was always playing catchup, at the same time that I was deadening my small energies. But I accept the dispensation, and I reached Chekhov in my time, and arrived there together with my daughter.  Did Frank Wheeler read Chekhov?  Probably, and that’s what makes him sad and doomed, and why he rushed without thinking into marrying a Chekhovian tragic heroine.  At least I didn’t make that mistake.

So we’ll see what tomorrow brings with the year of Yates, 2008; the year, for me, of 50th birthdays.  Chekhov and before that the Romans, can be seen from one perspective as a prelude.  It was mid-life literary discovery.  In March, a month ago, I felt the joy of literary discovery and mentioned it as I traced a connection between Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf, work that still needs to be completed.  But now in April, apropiately enough, we fine a rare phenomenon and time, as literature and reputation and film and discovery all come together at once. Coetzee fits into the same model.  What would it have been like to have read Coetzee in the 80s, so easily done?  I don’t really know what to say about these experiences.  The ruler in Lord of the Rings under the spell of age and decreptitude comes to mind, although I’m not sure why it feels like the spell on me is lifting now and Ihave a weird sort of middle-aged enlightenment and energy going.   I suppose there’s no excuse for it, really, and it’s just par for the course for me and my own regrets and blindness.  But I can also go a little easier on myself, and be glad to have arrived in the end, able to get it and share it and pass it on.  And even further, it just tells me that there are great and nourishing, captivating works and writers out there, all over the place, that there will continue to be discoveries and enthusiasms all the way through.