by Edward Champion

Bill Kristol: An Enemy to Women, An Enemy to Human Rights

Like many gutless conservatives, Bill Kristol stands against women’s rights. By demanding that protesters curtail their efforts, he is little more than one of Goldhagen’s “willing executioners.”

Yesterday, Bill Kristol — a vile and cowardly neoconservative opportunist who has deluded himself into believing that opposing Trump somehow makes him a more “reasonable” Republican — landed himself in rightful hot water when he tweeted for “civility.” Kristol, a repugnant man who has never known a day without a hot meal, rebuked protesters for protesting outside the homes of statesmen who stand in the way of autonomy, freedom, and a woman’s right to choose. Echoing the bullshit centrist line from Michelle Obama that has singlehandedly positioned Democrats into a wildly gullible and morally culpable party of eternal ineptitude, Kristol also urged protesters not to “intrude on people attending their houses of worship.”

Bill Kristol clearly does not have any significant understanding of human history. He also doesn’t seem to comprehend that his own wildly dangerous party is operating from a crazypants playbook created and practiced by vicious and duplicitous thugs who have openly flouted numerous judicial precedents that ostensibly upheld the liberties and agency of women and that now threaten to create a new form of slavery in which forced childbirth — even in cases of rape, incest, or when a baby that is fated to die — will become the cruel new norm.

In short, the unhinged assault on our democratic republic is very real — arguably one of the greatest perils to liberty in our lifetime — and it requires that we stop playing nice. “Civility” — or, at least, the bullshit bromides that Kristol cleaves to — hasn’t worked. The time has come to make the life of any atavistic scumbag who stands against women’s rights — and thus human rights — incredibly difficult — a living hell that will communicate in pellucid terms that the failure to respect a view that the majority of the American people support now — and even supported in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade — is completely unacceptable in the 21st century.

Is this fool really so naive as to not know about the Haymarket affair? Hundreds bravely fought for workers rights. A bomb was thrown. And the anarchists who adopted an ostensibly “fringe” position were rounded up and falsely criminalized — including people who had not actually attended this 1886 protest in Chicago. One of the falsely accused defendants committed suicide.

Is this wildly irresponsible oaf unfamiliar with the civil rights movement? Also messy. Lamar Smith — a venerated World War I vet — shot in the streets of Brookhaven, Mississippi for urging Blacks to exercise their right to vote in 1955. Or how about Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965 — in which peaceful protesters were brutally attacked by lawmen in Selma, Alabama? Or Jonathan Daniels? Murdered by an unpaid deputy sheriff after picketing whites-only stores.

I could go on, but Google is free.

Did this nitwit truly deposit his fat complacent head into the blissful sands of clueless ignorance when Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves was interviewed by Jake Tapper — on Mother’s Day, no less — and said, with wanton sociopathic glee, that forcing women to carry pregnancies to term in any scenario was just peachy keen? Here are actual sentiments from a pro-lifer just yesterday: “You have no choice. Not your body, not your choice. Your body is mine and you’re having my baby.” If Kristol refuses to recognize the abhorrent tyranny here, the fight that any card-carrying humanist should not sit out, then he has no business opining in any form.

Weak mediocre men like Kristol are very much one of the reasons why we’re here once again, forced to fight even as we remain exhausted for a right that should have been codified decades ago. Pusillanimous fossils like Kristol not only cheapen the difficult choice that any woman faces with abortion, but they belittle the bravery of anyone who remains rigorously committed to human rights.

With all due respect, Bill Kristol, go fuck yourself. And please be sure to let me know your “place of worship” so that I can show up and say this to your face. You see, if there isn’t a safe place for women, then there really shouldn’t be a safe place for you.

by Edward Champion

How NPR “Covers” Our Obscene Dystopia

One big reason why a Roe v. Wade overturn is likely to happen isn’t just an extremist Supreme Court. It’s also the apolitical fools who try to distract the American public from big issues with celebrity “news.”

Last night, Politico leaked a draft opinion from the Supreme Court — the first time that any early ruling had ever escaped the sacrosanct chambers in the high court’s entire history — that called for the unthinkable: a complete and total overturn of Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey). One would think that such an astonishing calumny against women’s rights, the precedents upheld by all justices in the past, and the ostensibly noble practice of jurisprudence would be front-page news for every outlet. One would think that such a significant sign that patriarchal fascism can become a real possibility in the United States would take up every column-inch and every second of airtime. But don’t tell that to the gutless onanistic “minds” at NPR, who took to Facebook with a piece on the Met Gala! Because, as far as NPR is concerned, rich people and what they wear is real news. And women are merely ornamental animals to fuel the next several rounds of vacuous social media speculation. Never mind their rights. Never mind their lives. Never mind their agency. And never mind the fact that all that they bravely fought for in the last several decades is now being rolled back faster than the time it takes to microwave a Hot Pocket.

Let us be clear about why and how NPR is a dumpster fire. It is a radio organization run by toothless conformists with a long history of looking the other way while catering to an increasingly invented audience of “upper middle-class” listeners with oodles of spare time to devour every celebrity offering (when these privileged mouth breathers aren’t busy sucking up air) and, as any audio producer learns from the whisper circles of mailing lists and DMs, regularly in the habit of stifling and “correcting” any original or unique voice to suit its despicably vanilla and anodyne “coverage” of events, which challenges no one and reveals nothing.

It’s no surprise to see that this bullshit outlet — now a pathetic parody of itself — would rather prioritize an obscene display of vacuous spectacle and empty wealth over far more pressing issues such as the erosion of women’s rights, the rise of American authoritarianism, the growing disparity in income inequality, escalating international conflict, and political corruption — all of which are allocated mere snippets. In short, NPR is a fucking embarrassment to journalism and a significant part of the problem. It “serves” the public much as I participate in triathlons — which is to say not at all. These feckless dimwits lunge for the safe and sane. They never take chances. They never rock boats.

NPR’s superficiality is perhaps best represented by the smug and vapid talking heads on Pop Culture Happy Hour, who bray regularly about the most inconsequential offerings on television with a mildly snarky style that feels as antediluvian as the Tamagotchi. As of Tuesday afternoon, Pop Culture Happy Hour “star” Linda Holmes has said precisely fuck all about Roe v. Wade to her 139,000 followers on Twitter. You see, Linda Holmes is living a comfortable life and she’s eked out such a hollow and cozy existence that she’ll never take a real stand on anything. But she does have plenty to say about the Ozark finale, which nobody will give a shit about in twenty years. You see, for myopic mercenaries like Holmes, Ozark counts as real news! Apparently, Holmes’s biggest problem in life is breaking some superficial rule in which she continued to watch a show that she “did not think was actually good because I just wanted to know the ending.” Someone bust out the smelling salts and the fainting couch for poor beleaguered Linda, folks! Meanwhile, the life, liberty, and health of women have become significantly imperiled thanks to extremist justices who were anointed by an orange tyrant and his fawning sociopathic acolytes.

The reason why we have reached this barbaric nadir in our history is not just because highly gullible and treacherous dolts like Susan Collins actually believed (or, more likely, claimed to believe) that Brett Kavanaugh would honor Roe v. Wade, but because frivolous and completely useless lightweights like Holmes, who have never taken a real chance in their sad and miserable lives, continue to uphold the apolitical status quo. I can genuinely imagine Linda Holmes ratting out liberals as they’re sent to the concentration camps in a few years, not long after telling a reptilian autocrat, “Well, officer, she brought up politics at the dinner table!” By remaining silent about the Roe v. Wade overturn, Holmes — much like all NPR employees who say nothing — is among what Goldhagen called “willing executioners.” And these unprincipled cowards are as much of a menace to our culture as the people who take our hard-won rights away. For hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.

[5/9/2022 UPDATE: In fairness to Holmes, she did finally say something in a thread involving Danielle Kurtzleben on May 6th, 2022 — a good four days after the Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked. But she largely complained about how exhausting it was to say anything — as if anyone presently on the involved front lines isn’t exhausted! Exhaustion doesn’t mean that you stop fighting. And when human rights are on the line, you don’t show up four days late to the debate.]

by Edward Champion

My Henry James Problem: Dinitia Smith and Susan Mizruchi (The Bat Segundo Show #553)

This 75 minute special edition of The Bat Segundo Show chronicles Our Correspondent’s efforts to find appreciation for an author he does not care for — namely, Henry James. Dinitia Smith and Susan Mizruchi are the guests for this program.

This Bat Segundo special chronicles Our Correspondent’s indefatigable and good faith efforts to find appreciation for an author he does not care for — namely, Henry James. Our Correspondent read numerous books for this particular episode and appealed to several James scholars and acolytes to help set him straight. Susan Mizruchi is most recently the author of Henry James: A Very Short Introduction. Dinitia Smith is most recently the author of The Prince.

Subjects Discussed: Dick Cavett, the Correspondent’s failure to love Henry James (particularly the late period), slow reading, how the pandemic stoked Henry James love, William Dean Howells, the initiated reader, James’s unruly prefaces, Lawrence Durrell, rereading The Golden Bowl, the description of afternoon tea in The Portrait of a Lady, Neal Stephenson, James’s characters, being married, Edith Wharton, Finnegans Wake, psychology, William James, Gore Vidal’s essay on The Golden Bowl, James’s “conversational style,” dialogue, Marlon Brando, the Correspondent’s Modern Library Reading Challenge, literary mansplaining, why Henry James film adaptations don’t help the Correspondent, Dark Shadows and The Turn of the Screw, Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, how James can inspire a novelist, transposing James to the 21st century, pastiches vs. homegrown style, James’s page-long sentences, the four characters at the center of The Golden Bowl, why the Assignhams are annoying, why James’s characters don’t seem to discuss anything other than the relationships that serve the storyline, creating grand houses, the urge to line-edit James’s very long sentences, pre-modern novelists, how The Ambassadors inspires nightmares, James’s class structure, robber barons, whether or not the descendants of rich people are friendly, how a cinematic sensibility meshes with James, taking The Golden Bowl apart, wealthy people and privacy, the Rockefellers, private islands, Andrew Carnegie, Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan, Frick and the Homestead Strike, Gardiners Island, the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James, The House of Mirth vs. The Golden Bowl, having a taste for James, the number of literary people who don’t like James, narrative deficiencies in postmodern novels, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala taking narrative liberties with Charlotte in her adaptation of The Golden Bowl, the tolerable qualities of dictators, vintage clothing and the rich, Rome as an inspirational force for literature, how cities change and how novelists adapt to those changes when writing about these cities, the Hudson Valley, transposing James’s London setting to New York, growing up in London, the dying Victorian echoes in British vernacular, how once dependable London tea spots have become gentrified, the UK aristocracy, passive-aggressive behavior in London, James’s life in England, British politeness and indirection, extramarital affairs, secrets that are buried in families, the secrets within James’s novels, Henry James vs. Lost, the insanity of rereading The Golden Bowl, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Virginia Woolf and James, when critics praise novels that nobody really likes, Jonathan Franzen, overwritten sentences, hate reading and rage, Henry James’s overuse of “connexion” and his annoying Anglophilia, the fluctuating importance of James, James Joyce vs. Henry James, the lack of humor in James, debating the “poetic” elements of James, how James dictating his work created resentment more than a century later, carpal tunnel syndrome, James as a closeted gay man, the regrettable depiction of women in The Golden Bowl, Proust, how James’s style evolved in his later work, the Oscar Wilde trial, how James’s personal dealings with women may have affected his literary depiction of women, how the transformation of marriage in the 20th century has affected portrayals of women in literature, #metoo and Henry James, the many books on Henry James in 2004 (Coim Toibin, David Lodge, et al.), women and jobs, postwar novelists, Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, George Eliot and Dorothea in Middlemarch, economic developments in the 20th century, writing and children, Iris Murdoch, and feminism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

CORRESPONDENT: Going back to the whole Henry James problem, here’s the thing. Right now, I’m actually going through all of Edith Wharton. And I love her. I love her. I have no such problems with her. She’s amazing. The House of Mirth. The Age of Innocence. All those ghost stories. She depicts class far more intelligently and far more subtly and with far greater nuance than Henry James. And not only that. I have to ding Henry James for taking ten years to befriend her after Edith Wharton was saying, “Hey, Henry! I love you!” And then he takes ten years and does that false modesty thing. Please give me a reason why I should give Henry James another shot. You talk about the mystery and the ambiguity. I look at his sentences and honestly I see something that is completely on the nose. I don’t see characters here who have the great vivacity of Lily Bart from The House of Mirth or any of these other great classics of that era. You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, I have to agree with you in some bizarre way. I love Edith Wharton. Of course they were friends. They became friends. He was kinda snotty about her first short story. But they became very close. She admired him so much. But I think you’re right in some way. With regard to The Golden Bowl, the only way to see it is as a mystery. But you have to go through these filaments of language and find the truth underneath it. And you have to have a taste for it. And I happen to like being surrounded by the miasma of Henry James, But Wharton is a great, great novelist. She tells you a story in plain English that you can lose yourself in. And I think human beings love stories. They tell stories every day. And my primary goal as a novelist is to tell a good story. So let’s just say that Henry James is a hobby of mine that not everyone shares.

CORRESPONDENT: I know. And look, I want to cultivate this taste, Dinitia, but I am having incredible difficulty with this late period — especially these last three novels. To me, Henry James is the most offensive mansplainer in all of American literature. Am I just missing some DNA that will allow me to appreciate Henry James? Come on! Stump for this guy for me!

SMITH: You make me laugh. I’ve learned as a novelist — and as a sort of literary person — just how many of my literary friends don’t like certain authors.

For example, I tend to not like a lot of contemporary novels, which are kind of postmodern, fragmentary, and usually about a woman with a husband betraying her. Or who doesn’t like her children. I think we can all be forgiven for not liking these novels, which are very, very successful right now.

But I think we all can be forgiven. I might discuss books with my friends and discover. There are certain authors that they just can’t abide by and they are very talented. I’ve learned to forgive myself when I find the authors that I don’t like. I suggest you forgive yourself and leave them alone and read Edith Wharton!

Music used in this show is licensed through Neosounds.

by Edward Champion

The Alexandria Quartet (Modern Library #70)

Lawrence Durrell’s four-volume masterpiece is a literary marvel that reminds us why it’s so important to follow the flagstones of the ambitious misfits and find inspiration to seek your own path.

(This is the thirty-first entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A High Wind in Jamaica.)

In a previous life, when talent and bonhomie mattered more than sad resentful ciphers dedicating their wasteful energies to demolishing rivals on social media, I had the great privilege to interview authors. I once made a northeastern trek by train to talk with a literary titan — a formidable essayist, a first-rate fiction writer, and a mischievous wit with a bright high voice who is still blessedly alive and who remains quite undersung today. After I pressed the square STOP button on my bulky black recording unit, we got to gabbing for two more hours off-tape — an act of generosity that stunned my companion and me. The author surprised us by confessing that she had played the then-in-vogue Angry Birds and we discussed the literary classics that young people read (or, more frequently, neglect). She was very likely picking our unweaned and less wiser brains in that pre-Trumpian epoch when, even then, declining erudition was a growing pestilence, as it wasn’t all too often that she had the company of young strangers at her long refectory table, which was punctuated by a plate of store-bought cookies that no one touched. The first name that this author mentioned was Lawrence Durrell.

“Does anyone even read him anymore?” she asked.

Neither my companion nor I had read a single word of this almighty author at the time. As I was to learn only in the last few months, I missed the teenage ritual of diving into Durrell by about five to ten years. Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. These were the four volumes read by an impressionable generation just before me. My older literary friends describe soaking up Durrell’s words with wide and voracious eyes around seventeen — just before they joined the less exclusive liturgical practice of tossing their tasseled caps into the heavens preceding the uncertain foray into higher education and the newfound duty of negotiating injurious capitalism (clearly not redeemable by taxation these days, contrary to sentiments expressed by the novelist Pursewarden in Mountolive).

Now that I have finally read the mighty quartet — with its gorgeous sentences, its exotic vernacular (which caused even a rhapsodic word nut and undefeated Wordle regular like me to make repeat trips to the dictionary), its bold meditations on “modern love” (a term of art regrettably coarsened by the New York Times‘s often vapid essays and an even more vacuous television offshoot) and intertextuality (most notably, Balthazar‘s Interlineal), its vast tapestry of unreliable narrators and colorful characters (many marked by disease and disfigurement and, most tellingly, the absence of eyes; the number of one-eyed characters throughout the Quartet greatly overshadows the sum of spastic dancers you’ll find in any Brooklyn nightclub on a Saturday night), and the hypnotic and baleful city at the center of all these proceedings — I am frankly kicking myself for not getting around to it much earlier. My reading experience was a true coup de foudre.

This tetralogy is clearly one of the 20th century’s greatest literary achievements. I suspect, as I crest closer to the age of fifty and reckon with surprising strains of unsummoned maturity that have often bemused me, that this was the last possible moment of my life in which I could have supped upon Durrell with an eager appetite. There are only a handful of living writers whose command of the written word beckons you to slow down and imbibe the text ever so delicately — much like a pied crested cuckoo leisurely supping on drops of rain water. Of Alexandria itself, we learn of warm winds that strike against the cheek as “soft as the brush of a fox” from an enchanting near-phantom city “whose pearly skies are broken in spring only by the white stalks of the minarets and the flocks of pigeons turning in clouds of silver and amethyst; whose veridian and black marble habour-water reflects the snouts of foreign men-of-war turning through their slow arcs.” Even if one is blind and cannot see the Nile’s adjacent estuary, there is eldritch life within the “gloomy subterranean library with its pools of shadow and light,” where “fingers [move] like ants across the perforated surfaces of books engraved for them by a machine.”

Shallow word-wasters have abseiled down the other side of once robust parapets with evermore ubiquity these days, emboldened by the narcotic allure of likes and follows rather than the purer and more rewarding journey set by the instinctive tempo of their distinct voices. But Durrell (whose name rhymes with “squirrel” and not the inexact “laurel,” as I have unknowingly mispronounced for decades) is very much on the level. Given the astronomical prices of his non-Alexandria volumes online — despite a well-received four season television series on the Durrell family in recent years and an enthusiastic nonprofit society sustaining a cheery and active Twitter presence — it appears likely that Lawrence Durrell is fated to be forgotten. All writers, of course, have their time and eventually fade into the sunset. Very few of today’s readers speak of Naipaul, Ford Maddox Ford, John Dos Passos, or even Anthony Burgess anymore. For some of these plodding stampeders now collecting well-earned dust in used bookstores from here to Gehenna, there is sturdy raison that only a handful of graying hangers-on will dispute. (Besides, what kind of giddy and obsessive bastard reckons with ancient canons when one is regularly unsettled by the cannonades of apocalyptic headlines and the high probability of a third world war? An increasingly shrinking number these days, easily a hundredfold more minuscule than the combined tally of all who still collect vinyl and Beanie Babies.) But in Durrell’s case, this feels like a notable criminal oversight. Particularly since crossing the four book Rubicon was, not so long ago, a vital rite for any stripling with unquenchable curiosity.

It all starts with an unnamed Irishman (whose name is revealed to be Darley a few books later) in exile on an island with a child, recalling his passionate affair with a woman named Justine.  Justine is married to a distinguished Copt diplomat named Nessim.  Before that, Justine had been married to a tyrannical French national and that life has been captured in a book called Moeurs written by some guy named Jacob Arnauti. Intertexuality and the struggle to make sense of ineffable feelings through words (or even the words from another committed and capricious chronicler) is very much a Durrell motif.  Darley has abandoned a devoted and far too patient dancer named Melissa for the sake of this seemingly distinguished affair.  There is also a mysterious painter named Clea, who smartly tells Darley, “Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people.”

But what if the “love” that Darley feels has not been reciprocated in the way that he has believed? Durrell’s second volume, Balthazar, calls into question all the events of the first volume, with Balthazar himself (a mystical Jewish doctor who is involved with the Cabal) arriving by sea with an annotated version of Darley’s manuscript.  The third volume, Mountolive, not only expands these angsty escapades to the vaster canvas of surprising espionage developments that often crackle with the griping momentum of a John le Carre novel, but reveals the tableau from the third-person vantage point of the titular diplomat, where we not only learn that Nessim has an unhinged brother named Narouz, but that Mountolive himself is mad about their mother, Leila. Finally, in Clea, we return back to the narrator Darley, five years after the Rashomon-like events of the first three volumes. The Second World War now unsettles the city. And the characters we have been rapturously following are still trying to make sense of the events that have happened, but what living now encompasses. Which is not all that removed from today’s practice of doomscrolling, dodging new variants, and submitting one’s deltoid for yet anther booster shot. As Darley himself puts it:

I am hunting for metaphors which mighty convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself.  Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world’s sorrows.

Amazingly, Durrell wrote Clea in four weeks.

It may seem from my description that Durrell was merely a relentless brooder, but he was often quite witty with his pen. Biographies from Ian MacNiven and Gordon Bowker both depict Durrell’s obsession with the great P.G. Wodehouse.  And Durrell fueled these comic energies in humorous stories about a diplomat named Antrobus.  While the tableau of Scobie cross-dressing as Dolly Varten in Balthazar possesses the dowdy feel of an entry in the Carry On film franchise, Sir Louis’s eccentricities in Mountolive could almost be interposed to an Evelyn Waugh novel:

Within the last year, and on the eve of retirement, the Ambassador had begun to drink rather too heavily — though never quite reaching the borders of incoherence. In the same period a new and somewhat surprising tic had developed. Enlivened by one cocktail too many he had formed the habit of uttering a low continuous humming noise at receptions which had earned him a rather questionable notoriety. But he himself had been unaware of this habit, and indeed at first indignantly denied its existence. He found to his surprise that he was in the habit of humming, over and over again, in basso profundo, a passage from the Dead March in Saul. It summed up, appropriately enough, a lifetime of acute boredom spent in the company of friendless officials and empty dignitaries.

One reason why Durrell’s voice is so distinct on the page — and why it has been so inimitable since (only Malcolm Bradbury and Roger Angell have attempted Durrell parodies, with unsustainable and ineffectual results) — is because he needed a fellow outlier (specifically, Henry Miller) and a commitment to impropriety and originality to get there. Indeed, as Durrell himself observed in a January 12, 1972 appearance at UCLA, his febrile dilettantism was his lodestar:

But it seems that every writer need a kind of placental relationship with another writer to approve of him and to help him. To reassure him. And it seems very curious how they come up in doubles in such very dissimilar people. I’m very frequently asked, “How could a writer like you admire Miller? And what on earth could he see in you?” The second question is difficult, I know. But a friendship is not qualified by the actual material one produces. And in our case, what we had in common was an unprofessional attitude to literature. In other words, neither of us were really interested in literature. Nor was Anais Nin. We were interested in other things. That is to say that we were not professional litterateurs. And we didn’t think professionally about writing. Writing, for us, was a kind of windscreen wiper which might help us to look ourselves in the eye a little more clearly. To liberate ourselves or to realize ourselves. In other words, our occupation was not literary, but philosophic really.

The journalist Peter Pomerantsev has suggested that Durrell only appeals to “the ‘cross-patriates,’ the hyphenated.” And he may very well be right. As a writer, audio producer, journalist, theatre producer, radio dramatist, sound designer, performer, voiceover man, TikTok microinfluencer (this still puzzles me),  and (just weeks ago) soundtrack composer, it’s becoming increasingly harder these days to find people who aren’t so singular and unadventurous in their passions and interests. As Cormac McCarthy has said, “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t. Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.” Those of us who find joie de vivre in living as widely and as fulsomely as we can are increasingly becoming exiles like Darley.

It’s also difficult to fathom the lion’s share of today’s emerging writers being driven by the same impetus. One’s individuality is now drowned out by the unceasing firth of social media’s brackish tide, its morass of groupthink. The urge to please, to install one’s self as some influential pinnacle who plays it safe, is diametrically opposed to the noble pairing of future artists who can provide mutual succor, possibly shaking the very foundations of an increasingly stodgy medium that rewards uninventive bougie hokum and shameless mimesis. Inimical idiocrats with such stultifying surnames as Athitakis, Ulin, Kellogg, Kachka, Kreizman, Miller, Grady, Romano, Freeman, and Schaub regularly stump for what Durrell identified (through his novelist character Pursehaven) as “the ancient tinned salad of the subsidised novel.” All of them, unlike Durrell, will scarcely be recalled by anyone fifteen years after they pass. They will live out their dull and unadventurous lives and take out their parasitic resentiment on true originals with pablumatic “hot takes” that are largely mercantile and self-serving. Having abdicated their sense of humor sometime in their thirties or forties, and expressing little more than a perfunctory interest in other things, these egregious weasels continue to wage war on any dazzling lights casting a lambent heat upon their cold and cozy conformity. And contemporary literature is lesser for it.

So it becomes increasingly urgent these days to not tuck true talents like Durrell into the granules of forgotten history. Literary achievement is consummated by puckish punks who stand against the boring norms, by young writers who pay close attention to the dazzling output of all the eclectic outliers who presaged them and who summon the instinctive effrontery to pick a crucial and principled fight in the mystifying battles against misfits.

Next Up: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth!

by Edward Champion

The Tyranny of Henry James: A Conversation with Dinitia Smith

I’ve had a long-standing Henry James problem. I believe James to be a literary tyrant. But Dinitia Smith — hot on the heels of a new book based on James’s The Golden Bowl — was kind enough to take some time to help a bald man in Brooklyn come to terms with Henry James.

I have read The Golden Bowl three times. I have read The Ambassadors three times. I have read The Wings of the Dove once. Despite these good faith reading efforts, I have detested Henry James — particularly late Henry James — with the force of a thousand suns. I find his interminable sentences to be tedious. I find his behavioral observations to be superficial. I would much rather be locked in a room with a garrulous chowderhead for a three-day weekend than deal with this hideous “Master” in any form.  In short, I cannot stand Henry James.

Unfortunately, I’m in something of a pickle. You see, because of my years-long Modern Library Reading Challenge project, I am fated to read those last three triple-deckers written by James at some point in the next few years.  And I am a man of my word.

And because I possess a highly stubborn temperament, I started contacting people who were obsessed with Henry James, hoping that they might be able to help me.

Thankfully, there was succor from an unanticipated source! When novelist Dinitia Smith heard about my Henry James problem, she swiftly offered to help me see the light. She had, after all, written The Prince, a modern day retelling of The Golden Bowl. What follows is a modest excerpt from our lengthy conversation, which occurred, rather fittingly, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a point where nearly everyone in the world was in a moribund mood. The full podcast of my conversation with Smith (as well as my good faith efforts to overcome Henry James’s tyranny) will be released sometime in the next week.

CORRESPONDENT: So there are two reasons why I’m talking to you. First, and most importantly, I’m here to unpack your book. Second, I have a problem with Henry James. I have tried. I have read him repeatedly. And he just doesn’t stick. And maybe one good way of initiating this conversation is to discuss what the appeal of Henry James is for you and how you approached writing this book [The Prince] with the so-called “Master” – what a debatable label!– in mind?

SMITH: Alright, I’ll begin with why I chose to do this.  And I’ll discuss with you — or tell you my feeling about Henry James. First of all, Henry James — as his career reached a kind of end — his last three books were very, very difficult books. The most difficult was the book, The Golden Bowl, which is his last complete novel. And it is difficult. Now I read Henry James in a certain way. I read him almost as if it were poetry. Um, it’s not. I don’t see a linear form in this. The last three novels, actually, are told from the point of view of the characters’s consciousness. Mostly they don’t speak very much. So the appeal? First of all, the difficulty I admit. And there is almost no novel as difficult as The Golden Bowl. But what appealed to me about The Golden Bowl is that it is about secrets. James’s novel is about a wealthy family with terrible secrets and it fascinates me how they solve these secrets.

And from that, I took my own novel. I borrowed the outlines of James’s novel for The Prince. And I then transferred that story to the 21st century. And, by nature of having been a journalist, I write in what could be called ordinary English. So my novel was very different. The Prince, in style, is completely different.

CORRESPONDENT: Oh yeah. And I noticed that, in the first third of the book, you made this attempt to mimic Henry James’s sentences. You had the commas and the clauses and all that. But you were also mercifully brief. You didn’t have page-long sentences. And, as the book carried on, I noticed that you increasingly drifted away from this style. I’m wondering: Was this an attempt initially to write a pastiche? What happened here?

SMITH: Very, very good question. First of all, in The Prince, I wasn’t aware of mimicking his style. I thought the style — even at the beginning of The Prince — was fairly ordinary.  I do go inside the character’s head a lot. I tell you what he or she is thinking. We see that with the character of the Prince, for example, at the beginning of the book. But I will tell you that, in the past, when I have been reading a lot of James and doing my own work, his style infects me. And I have to stop myself. But here I was very conscious in The Prince of telling a story in our time. And I love a good story. And that’s what interested me about my own book.

But Henry James – early James — is much easier to read. Late James, you have to decide that you’re just going to read this like poetry. Meaning certain words and phrases will stand out buried in very long sentences and paragraphs.

And you pick those out. Also, in Henry James, in The Golden Bowl, there is this element of mystery. You’re looking for meaning in this. I really didn’t have that in my novel, The Prince. What was pushing the novel forward was an illicit relationship between an impoverished Italian prince and his old girlfriend, while he is married to a very wealthy woman, and what happens in this love affair. Because this woman who he eventually has an affair with marries his father-in-law. The novel is about what happens when these secrets come to the surface and how the family — the wealthy patriarch and his daughter — solve this problem and what they know.

One thing I borrowed from James was the whole notion of gradual awareness and not wanting to admit what you see. As as someone once said, love is about not knowing and acknowledging. So I used to write this novel.

CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, I actually did reread The Golden Bowl before this conversation. I spent two days rereading it. I nearly lost my will to live, but I did reread it. One criticism I have of The Golden Bowl is that these characters talk about nothing other than the marriages of the other characters. And it’s this incredibly annoying gossipfest.  Particularly with the Assignhams, who are just annoying as hell to me. I mean, just shut up! It’s like I’m stuck on vacation, listening to these people gabbing — with that terrible dialogue and those terrible sentences. They don’t have anything else going on with their lives!

But in your book, you have Federico, who’s the Amerigo of your book, playing music in a band. He’s smoking pot. You have Emily, the Maggie Verver of your book, talking about taking classes, signing up for Teach for America. There’s a prenuptial agreement. There’s some concern with the President speaking about North Korea. I have to thank you for making your book readable.  Unlike Henry James. Because it’s actually realistic — the so-called mystery. And then you have the father-in-law, Henry, checking out the, the Charlotte character, Christina. And it’s far more plausible when it comes to human behavior, as far as I’m concerned. It seems to me that you were aware that Henry James was a bit one-note when it came to the reality that people have lives other than gossiping. You know what I mean?

SMITH: Yes, I do. Because, rarely in Henry James, do you encounter a character who actually has a job. Very rare.

CORRESPONDENT: I know!

SMITH: And a lot of this is because James was a precursor of what we call modernism. So a lot of this takes place within the consciousness of the characters. But there is that element. There’s a muffled quality in his books. You do get a sense of these grand houses, but in my book I actually had fun in The Prince, creating these grand houses in more vivid terms.

CORRESPONDENT: And thank you for that. Because The Golden Bowl is anything but fun.  I would not call these muscled sentences. I would call them, “Hey, you can say this in one third of the length, buddy!” You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, Ed, you’re not in the minority here. There are very, very literary people who have trouble with that book. In fact, William James — Henry’s brother.

CORRESPONDENT: Yes! He’s much better.

SMITH: He hated the book.

CORRESPONDENT: William James. I love! I have no problem with him. I love Thackeray. I love Dickens. I love Tolstoy. I love all of these great pre-modern novelists. But it’s Henry James who just makes me want to asphyxiate something. I mean, the last time I reread The Ambassadors — I kid you not! — I had a nightmare in which I was strangled by the sentences of James and I woke up in a cold sweat. So how can you help someone like me who wants to like Henry James? And I do like the early Henry James. But late James? This guy is a drunk at a bar, except he’s a little bit more highfalutin. He’s rambling incessantly. For God’s sake, just shut the hell up!

SMITH: You know, you’re making me laugh very hard. First of all, you mentioned his class structure. This is relevant to my novel, The Prince. In his novels, as I said, nobody ever has a job. They always take place on estates or in grand houses or plots. They rarely take place in the United States. There are scenes in the United States, but usually they move to Europe. He was writing about maybe the second generation of the robber baron class — the antecedents of those people, the rough, tough people who built the railroads.

And then they had offspring who became more educated. Who began to collect art — much like the father figure in my novel, The Prince.  So there is that truth. And I had a background as a filmmaker, which made me more interested in scenes.

CORRESPONDENT: I went to film school myself. So maybe you and I can find a common point? How does a film mind grasp the portentous length of Henry James’s oppressive sentences?

SMITH: You’re making me laugh as I discuss this. And I want to tell you you’re not alone. Maybe people will read my novel, The Prince, to get a sense of what his novels were about.  Because what I borrowed from James is essentially the structure and the ideas. My character — the wealthy father — is a descendant of the robber barons.  But, at this point, he’s gone to law school and he’s very conscious of his wealth and he becomes a public interest lawyer and he does very good things. Although he moves like this, you the wealth is in the air. He birthed his daughter, who is one of the characters in my novel.

Emily is her name. She did go to a very good school. She is smart, but, in that environment, she has had to hide her intelligence to some extent. So she’s a certain kind of woman you find in that world. But this was part of my effort to give life to these people, that perhaps is lacking in James. Although I do love Henry James.

CORRESPONDENT: Clearly. It’s very clear reading your book that you are a Henry James nerd. And that’s great! But at the same time, you are also very honest about Henry James’s fallacies.

SMITH: Yes, I think I am. You have to understand that, in writing The Prince, I spent one year rereading The Golden Bowl taking it apart.

CORRESPONDENT: Wow! How many times did you reread it?

SMITH: Well, in this case, because I was looking at it with the idea of writing a novel, it was probably one reading.  But I went back to certain chapters. I sat on the couch and read through Henry James. I was examining it, thinking about what each chapter in my own novel, The Prince, could be.

Thinking about how I could make these characters. There are certain elements in The Prince that are a continuation of James. For example, many wealthy descendants of the robber barons.  Think of the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts. They collected art. They made art museums or started them.

And I put that into my novel. We know in Henry James that he is going to involve himself in art. So I was interested in how this would happen with the new generations — in regard to the Rockefeller family, which is a good analogy.

I know immensely wealthy people who are very private about their wealth.  But in the Rockefeller family, the newest generation — or the generation that’s in their sixties and seventies — they became doctors and environmentalists. They had to live with the weight of the original Rockefeller, who was not a very nice man.

So that interested me.  It was fun to create a world.  In The Prince, I borrowed the notion of a private island   It’s sort of primeval place, which was fun.  And I created a house for each of them. I actually researched the decor these houses might have had.  Because these houses are a lot bigger than my house!

CORRESPONDENT: I’m getting the sense that you actually did more research on the robber barons of the Gilded Age.  More so than looking to The Golden Bowl itself. Would that be safe to say?

SMITH: Absolutely.

CORRESPONDENT: That would explain why your novel is readable! And Henry James’s The Golden Bowl is not! (laughs)

SMITH: Well, thank you. For The Prince, I should tell you that my husband is an historian.  He wrote a biography of Andrew Carnegie. And from that, and discussions with him, I learned a great deal about the robber barons.

CORRESPONDENT: Oh yeah. Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan is great too.

SMITH: Yes! Oh my. Yes. Very, very. And there have been biographies of Frick.  None of these guys were very nice.

CORRESPONDENT: Well, you had to be a bit of a dick in order the hoard all that wealth, right?

SMITH: Not only that, but to gain the wealth.  When you think of Frick and the strike. The Homestead Strike, where, you know, he called the Pinkertons on these people.

CORRESPONDENT: Yeah!

SMITH: Some people died and Carnegie was a participant. I have met some descendants of the Carnegie family. They couldn’t be more different from him.

CORRESPONDENT: They actually had a heart. That’s good to know.

SMITH: Yeah. Right. It was fun to create this private island. I was outraged that somebody could have a private island that big in the middle of the Long Island Sound!

I used research about a place called Gardiners Island — this huge place that belongs to the Gardiner family, which I had visited. So in the middle of the Long Island Sound, which is filled with boats and with some pollution, there is this primeval place with trees, an old manor house, and beautiful wildlife.

And so this purity is analogous to the purity of my character, Emily, in her realization of what’s going on.  A lot of this novel — my novel and James’s — is about her growth. And the solution to this problem, which I’d rather not give away, is almost monstrous.

CORRESPONDENT: Going back to the whole Henry James problem, here’s the thing. Right now, I’m actually going through all of Edith Wharton. And I love her. I love her. I have no such problems with her. She’s amazing. The House of Mirth. The Age of Innocence. All those ghost stories. She depicts class far more intelligently and far more subtly and with far greater nuance than Henry James. And not only that. I have to ding Henry James for taking ten years to befriend her after Edith Wharton was saying, “Hey, Henry! I love you!” And then he takes ten years and does that false modesty thing. Please give me a reason why I should give Henry James another shot. You talk about the mystery and the ambiguity. I look at his sentences and honestly I see something that is completely on the nose. I don’t see characters here who have the great vivacity of Lily Bart from The House of Mirth or any of these other great classics of that era. You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, I have to agree with you in some bizarre way. I love Edith Wharton. Of course they were friends. They became friends. He was kinda snotty about her first short story. But they became very close. She admired him so much. But I think you’re right in some way.  With regard to The Golden Bowl, the only way to see it is as a mystery. But you have to go through these filaments of language and find the truth underneath it.  And you have to have a taste for it. And I happen to like being surrounded by the miasma of Henry James,  But Wharton is a great, great novelist.  She tells you a story in plain English that you can lose yourself in. And I think human beings love stories. They tell stories every day. And my primary goal as a novelist is to tell a good story. So let’s just say that Henry James is a hobby of mine that not everyone shares.

CORRESPONDENT: I know. And look, I want to cultivate this taste, Dinitia, but I am having incredible difficulty with this late period — especially these last three novels. To me, Henry James is the most offensive mansplainer in all of American literature. Am I just missing some DNA that will allow me to appreciate Henry James? Come on!  Stump for this guy for me!

SMITH: You make me laugh. I’ve learned as a novelist — and as a sort of literary person — just how many of my literary friends don’t like certain authors.

For example, I tend to not like a lot of contemporary novels, which are kind of postmodern, fragmentary, and usually about a woman with a husband betraying her.  Or who doesn’t like her children. I think we can all be forgiven for not liking these novels, which are very, very successful right now.

But I think we all can be forgiven. I might discuss books with my friends and discover. There are certain authors that they just can’t abide by and they are very talented. I’ve learned to forgive myself when I find the authors that I don’t like.  I suggest you forgive yourself and leave them alone and read Edith Wharton!