December 10, 2015 Books Whiting Winners Choose Their Most Influential Books By Whiting Honorees Last March, we announced the ten winners of this year’s Whiting Awards, given annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Now we’ve asked eleven Whiting winners, past and present, to write about the books that have influenced them the most—a list to bear in mind as you choose your holiday reading. —D. P. Read More
December 7, 2015 Prison Lit Extreme Remedies By Max Nelson George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, forty years later. George Jackson Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on the French revolutionary Madame Roland, here. On August 21, 1971, George Jackson pulled a pistol on his wardens at San Quentin, the notoriously racist maximum-security prison to which he’d recently been relocated. When the news broke that he’d freed several of his fellow inmates, presided over the slashing of eight prison officials’ throats (six guards and two trustees), and then died under heavy gunfire while sprinting to freedom, it provoked a strange mixture of shock, anger, revulsion, and grief. Gregory Armstrong, Jackson’s editor at Bantam, would later confess to a reporter how relieved he was that he hadn’t followed through on his offer to help the younger man escape. Bob Dylan wrote a protest song in Jackson’s praise. (“He wouldn’t take shit from no one / He wouldn’t bow down or kneel / Authorities they hated him / Because he was just too real.”) Jackson’s attorney, Stephen Bingham, under suspicion of having smuggled in the escape weapon, fled the country for thirteen years. Huey Newton gave Jackson a long, effusive eulogy (“he lived the life that we must praise”). A group of Black Panthers imprisoned in Folsom advised his parents to “take pride in the fact that you have a large strong family of budding warriors.” Since the 1970 publication of Soledad Brother, his ferocious, disquieting collection of letters from prison, Jackson had been an international celebrity. In his introduction to the book’s first printing, Jean Genet insisted that the collection “must be read as a manifesto, as a tract, as a call to rebellion, since it is that first of all.” Abdellatif Laâbi read the letters admiringly during his own imprisonment; they let “one follow,” he told his wife in 1975, “the transformation of a man who challenges a new kind of slavery, strips its mechanisms down, and keeps his dignity intact throughout the worst kind of ordeal.” The day before Jackson’s death in 1971, Derrida wrote Genet a long letter worrying that the introduction hadn’t done justice to the dire situation Jackson’s writing was meant to expose. “With the best intentions in the world,” he cautioned, “with the most sincere moral indignation in the face of what, in effect, remains unbearable and inadmissible, one could then lock up again that which one says one wants to liberate.” Read More
December 4, 2015 Books Slow Days, Fast Company By Stephanie LaCava Eve Babitz’s singular take on Los Angeles. Babitz, as pictured on the first edition of Eve’s Hollywood. Years ago, a friend gave me a first edition of Eve Babitz’s second book, Slow Days, Fast Company (1974), which had slipped out of print. Tucked inside was a promotional photo of the author on thick, glossy Kodak paper; the back cover, featuring the same image, explained that Babitz had begun to write in 1972 after a stint designing album covers for Atlantic Records. It neglected to mention that she’d had romances with the portrait’s photographer, Paul Ruscha, and his brother, the artist Ed Ruscha—a kind of discretion she’s not often afforded. Most discussions of Babitz’s writing are preceded by a list of her paramours or a seemingly obligatory nod to the iconic 1963 photograph in which Babitz, nude, plays chess with Marcel Duchamp. I wouldn’t care so much about Babitz having dated Jim Morrison—one of her admitted “tar babies”—or having posed with Duchamp, except that her love life plays nicely into her game on the page: one of sharp, funny, memoiristic essays set in the late sixties and seventies Los Angeles scene. Babitz claims she started these studies at age fourteen. I believe her. She’s been working since she was a teenager, closely observing the people around her—few of whom, presumably, suspected that such a pretty party girl could be so gimlet-eyed. Read More
November 20, 2015 Books I Kissed the Rod By H. S. Cross Beneath its old-fashioned exterior, Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) radiates transgression. I really think I like Radley better than anyone else in the world. I simply loved being whacked by him. This extraordinary confession comes in the first chapter of Ernest Raymond’s 1922 novel, Tell England. It is offered in the dormitory after lights-out, whispered to the schoolboy narrator, Ray, by his friend Doe. Radley is their teacher, a tall, strict, athletic history master. You’d be hard-pressed to find a school story, or indeed a school, that didn’t go in for hero-worship, but Doe’s ardor overruns even that cup. Unlike Alec Waugh’s contemporaneous The Loom of Youth, which sought to expose the sexual and emotional realities of life in a boys’ school, Tell England is an old-fashioned, innocent, fundamentally Edwardian school story, a strange place to find such an extravagant declaration. Raymond wrote more than sixty novels, but his most popular by far was this, his first. Though panned by critics, it was reprinted fourteen times in 1922, became a movie in 1931, and by 1939 had sold 300,000 copies. Today, though, Tell England is largely forgotten. From its psychological and sexual cluelessness to its glorification of military sacrifice, the novel can feel tediously dated. It’s an odd hybrid, half public-school novel, half paean to World War I. It includes all the trappings of the classic school story: athletics, classical learning, chivalry, Anglican Christianity, romantic friendship, and, of course, corporal punishment. Like most school stories, it is a narrative of character development. After its young hero enters the school at the bottom, he learns the ways of its world, undergoes trials, and grows into a leader. Read More
November 17, 2015 Prison Lit Unseen, Even of Herself By Max Nelson Before she was guillotined, the inscrutable Madame Roland wrote a remarkable memoir. A portait of Madame Roland from Coiffure 1er Republique, a compendium of historical French hairstyles Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Abdellatif Laâbi’s poems, here. It could be said that the men with the greatest influence on Marie-Jean Phlipon’s life and legacy were two she never met. She rarely let herself depend too heavily on the male figures she knew: her husband, whom she respected and discretely controlled; the lawyer François Buzot, whom she came to love; and the many men of power whose authority she defied. It was Rousseau who provided “exactly the nourishment I needed,” she wrote, having read his La Nouvelle Héloïse in the wake of her mother’s death. “He showed me the possibility of domestic happiness and the delights that were available to me if I sought them.” Phlipon—a well-read engraver’s daughter who went on to become a martyr of the French Revolution—defined “domestic happiness” differently than most. Two years after Rousseau’s death, she married Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, whose political rise and fall she explores in the thrilling Memoirs she wrote from Paris’s Saint-Pélagie prison in the months leading up to her execution. Thomas Carlyle, the second man who shaped her reputation, was born two years after her death. When he gave his account of her in his 1837 history of the Revolution, it was left to others to decide whether he “interpreted feelings” that she had had herself: Read More
November 16, 2015 Books Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered By Thomas Mallon John O’Hara’s Pal Joey remains an exemplar of a rare form: the epistolary novella. From Robert Jonas’s cover for an early paperback edition of Pal Joey, ca. 1946. Ever see the movie? Well, do yourself a favor and don’t. You should pardon me for bringing this up right off the bat, but it’s so beyond being a mere stinkeroo that I get ahead of myself and must apologize. But you can trust me; I shall get back to it later. It’s hard not to start sounding like Joey Evans after listening to him come up off the pages of John O’Hara’s novella. In fact, even if you’re holding paper and ink, Pal Joey is always an “audio book” in some other, fundamental sense of the term. The osmotic nature of Joey’s voice affects even the other characters. Vera—the rich older woman whom O’Hara added to the theatrical adaptation—says, in a moment of amazed exasperation: “Good God, I’m getting to talk like you.” Joey’s is an American voice from the second act of the American century, a time when the country’s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world. O’Hara had the upwardly mobile luck to be in possession of the best ear anybody had for catching and transmitting the national lingo. Frank MacShane, one of the author’s biographers, explains that the first Pal Joey story, published in The New Yorker on October 22, 1938, got written after O’Hara went off on “a two‐day bender” instead of the stretch of work he’d pledged to his wife: Read More