by Edward Champion

The Moviegoer (Modern Library #60)

Walker Percy’s masterpiece is not only a fine exemplar of the Catholic novel’s contradictions about existence, but it is also a wry examination of life choices that are often irreconcilable with the very reason for existing!

(This is the forty-first entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Death Comes for the Archbishop.)

There are many go-nowhere men like Walker Percy’s Jack “Binx” Bolling in American life: the type who creates nothing and who lives like some vaguely seedy salesman overly concerned with easy comities and sartorial aesthetics, the quasi-urbane man who, at his worst, is so terrified of even remotely staining his choppers that he slurps nothing but colorless sugar-free smoothies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I can’t say that I’ve wanted to spend a day (much less a life) like this. I am too much of a creative, feverishly curious, and pro-active man with a formidable work ethic and a great brio for life (and all of its attendant messes) to do so, but I do have my moments when I feel the draw to lie in bed for hours and listen to the beautiful rap of rain against my window pane, which is certainly a more human pastime than sucking on the cheap glass teats of television and being extremely online. Then I come to my senses and realize that I do need to make something that day, with the fulsome freedom of not needing approbation, so that I can sleep better at night and feel some self-respect — a drive for independence and authenticity that is decreasingly shared by my fellow Americans as the apocalyptic headlines lull many formidable workhorses into permanent or partial fatigue. I don’t blame anyone for slumming it. This is an exhausting asceticism for anyone to practice and the prolificity that results from my febrile commitment is probably one reason why some people fear me.

But poor Binx Bolling has nothing like that, which is why I find him so interesting and why I find Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer to be more weirdly meaningful with each fresh reeread. Absent of any real purpose, Bolling spends much of this plotless novel trying to shoehorn his rudderless life into something, particularly a “search,” which is not really a search for anything. He seems unwilling to ride or die with unconscious instinct, with the sheer enjoyment of being alive. (Typical of Bolling, he has no allegiance. At one point, he even declares himself “Jewish by instinct.”) He recognizes that instinct is something that people possess, but that doesn’t seem enough for him:

At the great moments of life — success, failure, marriage, death— our kind of folks have always possessed a native instinct for behavior, a natural piety or grace, I don’t mind calling it. Whatever else we did or failed to do, we always had that. I’ll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity’s sake…Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal.

But is this really so “better”? This is fairly similar to Holden Caulfield’s insufferable kvetching, except that it is far more fascinating because Bolling, unlike Caulfield, is more actively self-aware and constantly observant of others. He chooses to think and feel this way. It is what I call the “fuck my life” look that you see on people’s faces after they have given up on any dreams after the age of forty.

While the Binx Bollings of our world are capable of a few spontaneous decisions and may possess some cultural tastes and perhaps a soupçon of passion, they differ from the “slacker” types that Richard Linklater rightfully celebrated in his wonderful 1991 film in that exuberance is often absent and there isn’t an unusual nobility or even an ethos to their indolence. (And I would contend that Bollling’s “novel ethos” is a false one. For he says this when he has nothing in particular he is striving for. And those who strive for something rarely have a mediocre ideal in mind.)

The Binx Bollings simply live and that’s about it. They are, in short, working stiffs and the burden of surviving is often too much to do much more than that. You’ll find them represented in varying shades within Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley, Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland, Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, and John Williams’s Stoner. And while I have no desire to leave out women in my literary consideration, yes, the fear of becoming “mediocre” or “detached” like this — the natural “evolution” of Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” or what Colin Wilson unpacked in The Outsider — does seem to be an overwhelmingly male concern. Contemporary novelists as brilliant as Adelle Waldman, Kate Christensen, and Lauren Groff (you should very much read their work too) have also tackled this to great effect, although they are usually more interested in effect rather than cause or state and the vicarious first-person experience is of less importance. Think of the way that the characters in Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch (all literary queens who I will enthuse about to my dying day!) are so much more alive than the Binx Bolling type. I also can’t help but think of the way Ross McElwee (also a man of the South) brilliantly and vulnerably put himself front and center in such a way with his fascinating series of personal documentaries. Updike, in particular, was one of the foremost literary Johns drawn to these men and he nimbly spoke to American readers who recognized the telltale cadences of Durkheimian anomie.

Which is not to negate the quotidian struggles of the Binx Bollings. The miracle of Percy’s novel is that we’re still with him on his journey despite all this. Still, it often never occurs to these types to pay attention to the “beloved father” or “husband of X” found so ubiquitously on tombstones, which matters so much more than the roll of a Taylorist scroll memorializing an endless concatenation of checked off tasks. The worst of these aimless men possess no sense of humor and somehow transform into a homely insectoid creature worse than anything that ever bolted upward from Kafka’s imagination, a listless monstrosity commonly referred to as a “critic.” The critic, who is often a cretin, is a pitiful and unsmiling quadraped incapable of expressing joy, much less stridulating his legs together to make a pleasant sound in springtime.

And while we’re on the subject of bugs, as it so happens, there is a cameo appearance from a coterie of creepy-crawlies in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer that saunter right past our malaise-fueled man Binx: “They dive and utter their thrumming skonk-skonk and go sculling up into the bright upper air.” Percy’s emphasis on sounds and gerunds here really says it all. That same whirlydirsh language is often beyond poor Binx.

* * *

The source for Boiling — as well as Williston Barrett, a Percy protagonist who would be explored in two stages of life (youthful folly and middle age) in, respectively, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming) — was Percy’s essay “The Man on the Train” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) — in which Percy firmly established the type of protagonist he was interested in writing about:

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reserved and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train….The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is! — which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation.

In other words, Percy could not bring himself to write about a character in unbearable despair (it is not an artistic focus for the faint of heart) — largely because his natural writing voice is driven by a fine comedic impetus, with the Catholic novelist’s concern for philosophy planting one foot in the wings and the other on stage. (Look no further than Antonia White, Gene Wolfe, and Graham Greene for similarly intriguing juxtapositions.) Much like Richard Linklater’s “slacker” archetype, Percy seeks to pursue the bare minimum of alienation, although, as can be seen with Dr. Thomas More in Love in the Ruins, Percy’s characters are more eggs-in-one-basket types (in More’s case, the Ontological Lapsometer that he sees as a decaying society’s cure-all) and less committed to the free-floating spontaneity of hitching a ride with strangers, taking the entire day to assemble an elaborate rock structure to represent femininity, or being interviewed for a film student’s documentary.

At this point, the gusto-driven reader may rightfully ask, “So why read about this?” For the same reason that we read about any “unlikable” character. This is a form of living, albeit while clutching the bottom of one’s hemp, that is part of the human experience. The eccentric film journalist Jeffrey Wells has recently suggested that the criteria of art (specifically movies) involves being put into “a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state.” And while escapism is certainly a dopamine-fueled pastime practiced by a population increasingly hostile to pleasurable cerebration, requiring little of the mind but an uncritical blank slate and a sybarite’s zeal for incessant orgasm, what of the wisdom picked up from raw human experience? Art gives us the advantage of having access to the interior thoughts and feelings of those we may be disinclined to meet in the here and now. Wells’s limited definition therefore nullifies Jonathan Glazer’s excellent film adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, which is nothing less than a vital and deeply horrifying atmospheric experience warning us of the shockingly pedestrian character of fascism, which is dangerously close to permanently destroying the very fabric of this bountiful nation should the Orange Menace emerge victorious in November.

Likewise, Walker Percy’s masterpiece is a similar (if less baleful) cautionary tale of what it means to coast and how commitment to something (or, in Bolling’s case, someone) represents the inevitable reckoning that anyone is fated to face at one point or another. It is a sneaky warning to anyone with true fuck-it-all drive that even the dreamer faces the risk of slipping into adamantine complacency and is ill-equipped to gently pluck a rose from the carefully maintained bush planted atop a Sisyphean alp.

The New Yorker‘s Paul Elie has smartly observed that The Moviegoer is curiously ahistorical: less taken with unpacking the neverending residue of the Civil War, racial tension, or other hallmarks found prodigiously within typical Southern fiction. The novel is also, by its own prefatory admission, an inexact version of New Orleans: far from meticulously recreated like Joyce’s Dublin, though not entirely fabulist.

But I do think Elie is a tad too dismissive of Southern inventiveness to suggest that Percy mined exclusively from the European existentialists to summon his vision of the unlived and shakily examined life — even though the debt to Kierkegaard is obvious in The Moviegoer (and in “The Man on the Train”), not just because of the opening epigraph:

As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as opportunity presents itself – if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

But what is this search? I strongly recommend Rose Engler’s smart unpacking, which eloquently outlines the religious component that was dear to Percy, but there is something intriguingly postmodern about it. One of Percy’s early reviewers — Edwin Kennebeck in Commonweal — believed that The Moviegoer entailed a search not merely for meaning, but for something beyond despair. And there is something to this, given how Bolling categorizes the search early on as “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” The movies that Bolling regularly watches do not present a true search. And, for Bolling, it can be argued that his search involves doing everything possible to avoid that search, even though he knows inherently that he must search. Denied definitive time and space by Percy, Bolling splits up his search into horizontal and vertical ones, framed without any proper construct from Eddington’s The Expanding Universe. He complains of his family not understanding his search. He searches for a starting point by scribbling in a notebook and, after all this “effort,” tells us, “The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly.”

Kenneback pinpointed, quite rightly, that Bolling’s decision to marry Kate represented “a search ended and an ordeal begun.” Belonging then, which most of us crave for and which Bolling is not especially good at, represents the cruel gauntlet thrown down by the universe. Bolling tells us, “Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair.” He believes that Kate sustains a look of being serious, “which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”

Perhaps we’re all pretending in one way or another as we saunter about this mortal coil. But the tragedy of Binx Bolling is that, even with his apparent religious conversion, he cannot seem to accept life at face value. But he is not the only one suffering. Kate has this to say:

“Have you ever noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck — people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

If our presence here is indeed ephemeral, should this not provide greater motive to connect and to find joy? The Catholic mind, and thus the Catholic novel, is not without its involutions and contradictions.

Next Up: Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson!

by Edward Champion

Ryan Walters: Oklahoma Czar of Hate, Intolerance, and Transphobia

A bright and precocious 16-year-old nonbinary girl died in Ossawo, Oklahoma. This didn’t need to happen. And this would not have happened if bigots like State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters had never held office.

Nex Benedict was sixteen years old. Like many smart and ferociously curious kids, Nex enjoyed reading and drawing. They were into Minecraft and The Walking Dead. Nex was part Choctaw and had a loving cat named Zeus. They earned straight As.

In any sane and tolerant world, Nex would have blossomed into adulthood. In all likelihood, they would have lived a rich and meaningful life.

But that didn’t happen. Nex Benedict is now dead.

Nex Benedict is dead — needlessly dead, unpardonably dead, heartbreakingly dead — because they were nonbinary and lived in Ossawo, Oklahoma — a hotbed of hate and intolerance in which cruel, unrepentant, and opportunistic sociopaths like Ryan Walters (of which more anon) gleefully cranked up the temperature and brought out the most savage and hotheaded elements in its otherwise law-abiding population.

While the precise cause of death is still being investigated (according to a Facebook statement from the police department), what is indisputable is this: (1) There was a violent altercation in the Ossawo High School girl’s bathroom. (2) Nex Benedict suffered significant injuries from other girls as a result of this incident. (3) Despite Nex’s injuries, the school did not call an ambulance service for Nex. (4) It was recommended by the school nurse that Nex visit a medical facility. (5) The next day — February 8, 2024 — the Ossawo Fire Department were dispatched for a medical emergency, which resulted in Nex being conveyed to the St. Francis Pediatric emergency room, where Nex then died.

Ossawo, Oklahoma is a community of 38,732 people in which someone erected a “Let’s Go Brandon” billboard on US 169 near the 76th Street North exit and in which Alee McLain — a right-wing fanatic who is the admin of the Owasso Area Republican Women’s Club Facebook page — falsely accused Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn of encouraging an environment in which children were sexually groomed. (Osborn is a Republican who had been on the board of directors of Honestly, which focused in part on “youth sexual health.” Like many histrionic Republicans fond of using their deranged imagination to invent mythical dens of iniquity from pizza parlors, McLain bought into a conspiracy conjured up by the Oklahoma City Republican Women’s Club without question. It didn’t take long for the hateful froth to foam from the dank corners of her mottled mouth on cue.)

Oklahoma is a state in which cruel, hateful, and unremarkable bigots like Ryan Walters inexplicably become the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and enact callous policies that create intolerant impressions that kids pick up on.

Adults — particularly those who are far enough removed from childhood to forget how impressionable they once were — often ignore the reality that kids (and these kids, much like McLain, can sometimes be as old as fifty-five years old) pay close attention to what they say.

Walters undoubtedly knew this when he fomented hate and transphobic sentiment in his capacity as a public official last year. On June 29, 2023, Walters released a bigoted video on the Oklahoma State Department of Education YouTube account in which he declared:

And there’s dangerous consequences [sic] when common sense is vacated. And we’ve seen, we see a district here in the state where a boy was allowed to go into the girl’s restroom and assaulted two young girls there.

There was just one problem. Aside from misgendering a girl with his insufferably pompous illiteracy, Walters got the facts wrong.

Walters was referring to an October 26, 2022 incident at Edmond Public Schools in which a trans girl got into a physical dispute with a cisgender girl in a girls bathroom. But, as Assigned Media has reported, the details from the two girls are contradictory and murky. The right-wing “news” outlets that covered this incident made no effort to get the details from the trans girl’s perspective. The most neutral news story that Assigned ferreted out was, improbably, the conservative Washington Examiner — where the injuries in question were reported as “minor.” (It is also important to note that Edmond Public Superintendent Angela Grunewald — targeted by Walters in his unhinged state-sanctioned hate speech — was careful to observe, “We don’t want a student hurt at all, whether minor or serious.”)

Unlike this embellished Edmond case, the Ossawo, Oklahoma bathroom incident involved a trans girl who was victimized for being gender-fluid and who is now dead. And because Ryan Walters cannot perceive any LGBTQIA person as a human being — whether adult or child — a glimpse at Ryan Walters’s X/Twitter account reveals no statement expressing even a pro forma “thoughts and prayers” for Nex’s death. In other words, Walters is such an indecent monster, one so riddled with fury and intolerance, that he cannot even engage in the standard cosplay concern one sees from indifferent right-wingers after the latest mass shooting. He has, however, offered more lies, including the risible suggestion that Edmond Public Schools “embraces porn” (the books in question were The Kite Runner and The Glass Castle, which are both no more pornographic than someone wearing shorts on a hot summer day, as well as a baffling intolerance for drag queens. (Here are some interesting statistics from the squeaky-clean data wranglers at Gitnux: There are an estimated 6,100 drag queens in the United States. Approximately 72% of drag queens encountered some form of prejudice or discrimination in 2019. Walters then is clearly more of a force promoting intolerance rather than fighting it.)

Walters was motivated in large part by noted gubernatorial hatemonger Kevin Stitt — a 51-year-old man whose pitch-black hair and permanent scowl bears an uncanny resemblance to the inert and incinerated cilia in a lifelong smoker’s lungs.

On May 25, 2022, Governor Stitt signed one of the most transphobic laws on the books, requiring students at schools to produce their birth certificates for inspection and use the gender listed on that as the basis for what restrooms and locker rooms to use. (This followed a move by Stitt to ban a nonbinary gender marker on all birth certificates issued in Oklahoma.)

Walters naturally followed in these baleful footsteps like an eager bottom.

And because of this, Nex Benedict — a promising student — is now dead.

In all likelihood, Nex would not be dead if Stitt had not signed this bill into law and if Walters had not published his vile video on YouTube. It is almost certain that if these bigots had not pushed so hard and callously with their demagoguery, the people of Oklahoma would have eventually learned greater LGBTQIA tolerance, perhaps codified by state law.

But it seems that Walters and Stitt are more interested in being on the wrong side of history, much as Tulsa was on the wrong side of history in 1921. Keep in mind that Oklahoma is a state in which, just last year, the Sheriff of McCurtain County and several officials expressed a desire to string up Blacks and murder journalists. And while hundred of valiant and principled Oklahomans protested outside the Sheriff’s Office, the racist Sheriff still kept his job.

Now that blood is on Ryan Walters’s hands, the question is whether Ryan Walters will keep his job. His term ends in 2027 and, with xenophobia happening so fast, that seems too far away. There is a movement to impeach him. There have been floods of comments. But Walters will still continue to spout forth piss like some Speer-inspired fountain installed in 1930s Berlin. How many kids have to be brutalized before the people of Oklahoma decide that there is no place in their state for hate and death?

by Edward Champion

Tell Them While They’re Still Around

We often forget that those who we love are not immortal. But it’s important to remind our loved ones how much they mean to us.

You don’t know her name. You’re not going to get her name from me. But she was dear to me in ways that I cannot fully convey and I loved her hard. And I also know that she loved me hard.

I got the call tonight when I was taking notes on Gnostic scholars in a bar while nursing a pint. This is what now constitutes a wild Saturday night for me.

I knew that the news was grave.

I ran outside into 28 degree weather so that I could offer my full attention. I forgot to put on my coat. Somehow that didn’t matter.

She was eighty-three years old. And now she was gone.

She liked mystery novels. She had a brilliantly dry sense of humor. She saw through all forms of bullshit — including mine, for I am a first-class bullshit artist when I want to be — in a way that made you always tell her the truth. And then she would tell you her truth.

I suspect that, had I never met her, I wouldn’t have been so committed to emotional honesty in all that I do.

My job during that moment outside was simple: keep the grieving party laughing. This is what I’m very good at. And sure enough he was doubled over on the phone when I delivered some dependable jokes. This is what I do. Later I alerted a mutual friend to call him and do the same. My friend said he would do so. My friend is also a jokester. We jokesters have the backs of our friends in ways that are more loyal than you could ever imagine.

She knew that I had defied the odds and climbed out of the abyss and improbably done something with my life after my breakdown ten years before. She saw pictures of me with my girlfriend and her kids. Most importantly, she knew that I had patched things up with her son and that we were speaking regularly again. We have known each other for a very long time and I still love him as much as I loved her.

Decades before, she gave me a place to stay when my own family declared me dead. Decades before, she saw just how fucked up my family dynamic was and she valiantly stepped in, knowing that it was a losing battle.

“My God,” I said, “she really didn’t need to do that.”

“I know,” said her son.

“That’s how amazing your mother was.”

“I know,” he said, crying.

And then I got him laughing again. Because I had to alleviate my friend’s pain. He’s done the same for me so many times.

She was so smart and so kind. The kind of mother I should have had but didn’t. Because I lost big at the family lottery. And she knew that.

And the greatest regret I have right now is not reminding her of that in her final days. That’s what is causing me to cry. I really should have talked to her more when I patched things up with her son.

But at least she knew that I ended up okay. She heard about the many adventures that her son and I had. And we kept her smiling and living in our own modest ways.

But I still regret not telling her directly. I regret not giving her the full epic theatrical storytelling treatment that gets me invited to parties.

And all I have to say is this. If you love someone, tell them how amazing they are while they’re still around.

It is a mistake that I keep making. But I’m going to do better.

Tell them how much you love them, how much their actions and gestures meant to you, while they’re still around.

Yes, she knew. I know she knew. But some things are better uttered. For you and the other person.

Tell them while they’re still around. Because if you don’t, the great void that they leave in their wake will feel even vaster. And you’ll have more regrets to add to the tab of life.

Tell them while they’re still around.

by Edward Champion

People with Mental Disabilities Are Not Your Online Playthings

Talented writers are often exploited by media outlets, often at the expense of their own mental health. This practice needs to stop. We need empathy and understanding, not exploitation.

On February 14, 2024, The Cut published an essay by Emily Gould. A few people forwarded it to me — perhaps because of my own checkered history with Gould, a history for which I feel great shame and deep regret about.

Presumably, a few of these people hoped that I would snark it up.

Well, I can’t. It is absolutely impossible for me to do so in any way after reading that essay.

Aside from the fact that Emily Gould is, like all of us, a human being, there’s also this to consider: I did wrong. Significant wrong. Tectonic-plate shifting wrong that has largely (and perhaps rightly) been perceived as unforgivable.

I am not asking for forgiveness. But because I have done wrong, it is my duty and my responsibility to address Gould’s essay. It’s important for people to know and fully understand exactly how the New York media world openly exploits people with mental health issues and how we perceive people on social media through these hideous fishbowls that only intensify the pain that they have to live with. They did it to me. They have done it to so many other people with Everest-sized hearts and stratospheric talent. They’ll continue to do it to others.

Right now they’re doing it to Emily Gould.

And that is absolutely wrong.

I have to put my foot down.

Enough is enough.

It is morally indefensible to leave Emily Gould so open and vulnerable to vituperative comments and attacks that she should not be reading right now.

Emily Gould is a human being who needs help. It’s truly that simple.

I attempted to leave a version of the below essay in the Cut comments, but, rather predictably, the New York Magazine people censored me. I’m honestly not surprised. Online hate is the only currency they have to recoup their investment on whatever vilely picayune amount they paid out to Emily Gould for her essay. This whole business of exploiting someone’s worst demons like this is a deeply sickening and repugnant three-ring circus that only grows worse as so many media outlets cut more jobs.

Here is the goddamned truth. I will not be able to sleep tonight if I don’t say what I have to say — which is probably not what you are going to expect from me. So here goes.

* * *

In 2007, Emily Gould put up a vicious post on Gawker in which she defamed me. I had made a splash as a quirky literary journalist with some reach. I was literally living hand-to-mouth and Gould was savage and merciless, ridiculing me as I was desperately trying to collect a check from a deadbeat editor to buy food. I later learned that Gould had been planting seeds of gossip about me on the literary cocktail party circuit.

Seven years after Gould’s post, I went through a significant mental health crisis that went terribly public. The same thing that’s happening with Gould’s essay. I was unwell, much as Gould here is unwell.

While reading this essay, I misted up several times, recognizing patterns of self-delusion that I believed in when I had my breakdown. You see, when I went through my own mental breakdown, I should not have been writing publicly like some monkey dancing for other people’s amusement in a zoo. At the time, I had the wrong friends, the wrong partner, and the wrong support group. I should have removed myself entirely from the media/literary circuit and asked for help and forgiveness. I did not do that. Instead, I went full-bore self-destructive, much like Gould here. That’s the great cruelty of mental illness: you truly and stupidly believe that you are invincible and you often refuse to acknowledge your own wrongs. Even when you are unknowingly and uncontrollably hurting people. (I feel so bad for Keith and the kids.)

I wrote an extremely vicious and completely unacceptable article about Gould that I still feel great shame about to this very day, that I again apologize for, and that I wish that I had never published. This piece was seized upon by the very rumormongering crowd that Gould ran with. It only served to exacerbate my crisis and erode the good will and high caliber offerings that I had spent years building up. When I returned with my podcast in an attempt to “reclaim” myself (like Gould here), Gould helped lead a hateful campaign against me and, in a now deleted tweet, expressed her great hope that I would kill myself. And it helped to push me over the edge, leading to an uncontrolled drinking binge, a suicide attempt, my hospitalization, six months of homelessness, and a long article with a substantial number of completely untrue and unverified stories about me that I still have to answer to nearly ten years later. Anyone who knows me in the real world knows who I am. Anyone who has never met me believes I am something else: a cartoonish villain that has been created by the media industrial complex. I am absolutely certain that there is a similar disparity between the Real Emily and the Media Emily. And I was absolutely wrong to perpetuate any notion of Emily Gould as a cartoon.

I have read Emily Gould’s essay three times. As someone who has been through the wringer and who has cleaned himself up, I am asking all of you to back off here. Please do not speculate. Please do not condemn. Please do not judge. You do not know Emily Gould anymore than I do. This is only going to make things worse for Gould, her family, and her friends.

Empathy. That’s what I’m calling for. Gould has the same problem I had: spill all your problems into a major public forum, get attention, but never entirely address the true underlying problems.

Emily, if you’re reading this, I urge you — as a fellow depressive who has no ill will towards you, who forgives you, and who apologizes for any harm I have caused — to keep your demons private and to not allow any editor to exploit your pain and depression for mercantile gain. And if you think you can’t do it, I’m telling you that you can. I got off heavy drinking. I got off cigarettes. And I was highly accomplished at both of those forms of slow suicide. I’m now in a happy relationship and I am a father figure to two lovely kids. And that matters more than any “fame” I once had or any infamy I now possess in spurts. Live. Be humble and grateful. Take care of yourself. That’s more important than being a writer. I urge you from the bottom of my heart to live the best and most peaceful life you can. We only go around this merry-go-round once and you, like anyone, deserve the best ride imaginable.

2/14/24 PM UPDATE: The exploitation of Emily Gould’s mental disability for financial gain appears to be much bigger than I initially estimated. Publishers Lunch reports that Gould will apparently be publishing a book version of her bipolar year with Avid Reader Press. Presumably, the essay featured in The Cut serves as a precursor. Gould’s original Twitter account was suspended — for reasons unknown. But she is still going strong with a Twitter account sanctioned by New York Magazine.

2/15/24 UPDATE: While I quietly unpublished my 2014 essay about Emily Gould (and its attendant comments) last night, my understanding is that some people are still able to access it through a Google cache. I respectfully request that you do not read it or track it down. There is no reason to cause any of the parties further pain or grief. Let me be clear: I fully renounce the ugly words that I wrote in 2014. It was a colossal mistake and I again sincerely apologize to anyone who I had ever hurt. Thank you.

by Edward Champion

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Modern Library #61)

In addition to being a largely humorless and incredibly overrated writer, Willa Cather was a supercilious white supremacist reveling in racist stereotypes and a corn-pone practitioner of the worst kind. There is no way that I can defend her work in 2024.

(This is the fortieth entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: From Here to Eternity.)

Most of the largely sexist pigs who came up with the Modern Library canon were ancient men more fond of oinking and logrolling rather than upholding literary standards. (There was only one woman among these judges: to evoke a recent Marc Maron bit, “It was a different time”).

Most of these judges are now dead. Just as the regressive viewpoints they tapped within their 20th century hearts are now mostly pushing up the daisies. (Thank you, #metoo movement!) Oddball Christopher Cerf is the only judge still alive and I invite him to verbal pistols at dawn (or perhaps, more accurately, a feisty reckoning over a cup of morning tea) if he wants to respond to the list’s hideous gender imbalance. The remaining judiciary corpses include Gore Vidal (dead, past his prime in ’98), Daniel J. Boorstin (dead, past his prime in ’98), Shelby Foote (dead, covert Confederacy apologist, we’ll be getting to him in a few years, past his prime in ’98), Vartan Gregorian (dead, but, from all reports, a decent dude), A.S. Byatt (GOAT, literally just died in November, should have pushed back harder against these testosterone-charged fossils, being a Willa Cather fan seems to be her only fault), Edmund Morris (dead, past his prime in ’98 and about to destroy his career with Dutch), John Richardson (dead, past his prime in ’98), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (dead, past his prime in ’98), and William Styron (dead, perilously close to being done in ’98, but dammit he at least gave us Darkness Visible, which was rightly included on the Modern Library nonfiction list).

Anyway, it says a great deal about the casual misogyny of these then doddering judges that a hopeless and unremarkable square like Willa Cather (the kind of teeming bore that other teeming bores genuflect to) somehow secured a much higher slot than such indisputable virtuosos as Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark. It says a great deal that Willa “Cream Corn” Cather — a plodding rustic rube without a soupçon of edge who wrote sentences so loathsome that, only ten minutes after reading an especially awful exemplar, I sprout wings from my back, descend with my fangs upon innocents in Manhattan, and destroy random chevron-studded façades and angelic statuary mounted on art deco skyscrapers hundreds of feet above the streets (if you Google around, you’ll find TikToks out there depicting my frightening transmutation; it is a display that is not for the faint of heart) — is apparently more worthy of commendation than Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O’Connor, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Bowles, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Harper Lee, who were all denied a single spot on the list.

In 1998, did the Modern Library Judges fear what was then called an “outspoken” woman? Did they wish to consign “innovation” solely to men? Were they unsettled by the many waves of feminism? Did they try to argue that an insufferable reactionary goody little two-shoes like Cather was a feminist because she exposed spousal discontent through only the barest minimum amount of effort (see Alexandra in My Ántonia; if you think that’s a “radical” depiction of what women had to go through, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you here in Brooklyn) and because she was a closeted lesbian (even as she was tearing down other women of letters privately and publicly)?

At this point, we’ll probably never know. The likeliest scenario is that Cerf will stay mum and take the problematic history of these internal discussions to the grave. And let’s face the facts: the dude wouldn’t meet me for tea even if I whipped up a fun electro cover of one of his two hundred plus compositions for Sesame Street. (Yo, Chris, I’ve got terabytes of samples on my desktop! If a goofy emo punk version of “Monster in the Mirror” whipped up on my synth over the weekend will get you to cough up about this regrettable state of affairs, then I’ll do it! Seriously, that “wubba wubba wubba wubba woo woo woo” just begs to be rasped out in the manner similar to the late Can singer Damo Suzuki.)

The wondrous Dame Hermione Lee, who remains one of our greatest living literary scholars, has written a solid and truly admirable bio advocating for Cather. And while I appreciated Lee’s volume in much the same way that I will always stump for Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love, which reckons with the question on why so many people love Celine Dion, make no mistake: I consider anyone willing to go to the mat for Willa Cather to be some terminally unhip rooster without a shred of literary taste, the kind of unadventurous sod who would invite suicidal thoughts if you got cornered by him at a cocktail party. Lee gets special dispensation from me because she’s awesome — in large part because she wrote an invaluable Edith Wharton book (and I am, of course, crazy about Wharton). In fact, in quoting a passage from One of Ours that described junk, Lee identified a possible class-based literary divide between people like me who detest Cather and certain frou-frou bourgie types who think that she’s the cat’s pajamas (Christian Lander, you were so asleep at the wheel on the Cather front when you ran your excellent satirical blog!):

There is a hint that junk, once it starts ageing into antiques, might be seductive (an American writer with more entropic tendencies, like Nathanael West or Thomas Pynchon, would have loved that cellar) but, more often, junk is just pitiful, like the debris of Claude’s marital house: ‘How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed!’ [OOO, p. 223] When Claude comes to the ‘dump-heap’ of the French battlefields, he has already been living in a civilization (Cather suggests) which has not needed a war to turn itself into rubbish.

You have to love that “Cather suggests” parenthetical that Lee drops into this cogent analysis. (Don’t worry, Hermione! We cool! I have Quincy Jones’s wonderful Sanford and Son theme playing in the back as I write this paragraph!) I guess you could say that I’m one of those readers who is more drawn to authors with “entropic tendencies.” I believe you can find beauty in damned near anything. Including junk. But Cather, despite stumping for the heartland, is more of a rebuking prude who never earned the right to be a snob. She’d rather throw out the junk and align herself with the sanitarium/cornflakes crowd: you know, the alternative medicine quacks sent up decades later in T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville. I know you whipper-snappers are keeping up with me in our age of conspiracy theories, rampant cognitive decline, and unfounded character assassination on social media. Or at least I hope you are!

There’s also the question of whether Cather’s “literary sensibilities” can be entirely trusted. Of The Awakening, Cather had the audacity to write, “I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.” One might say the same of a hopeless stiff like Cather herself, though she does not possess anything especially exquisite in her early works beyond country bumpkin exclamation marks. She condemned Mark Twain — arguably the greatest wit that American letters has ever produced — as a man of “limited mentality” and “neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters and very little of a gentleman.”

Yes, I realize that all this was written in the nineteenth century and it is incredibly absurd to pick a fight with somebody who has been dead for nearly eight decades. But I’m telling you. After reading far more Cather than I needed to for this essay, I had actual nightmares about Cather strangling me while laughing in a menacing high-pitched titter. These dreams were so terrifying that I would not even wish them on my worst enemy. And if I have to write about this mediocre and humorless nitwit from Nebraska because she’s on this goddamned Modern Library list, well, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, them’s fighting words.

Let’s take a look at some of the trite and treacly bullshit that Cather was banging out when she rolled out the howitzers against these legends.

From “Paul’s Case”:

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were home, and “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.”

Note the redundancies here (“cruising in the Mediterranean” and “arranging his office hours on his yacht”). Even an oft prolix mofo like me recognizes this sentence as interminably long, presumably extended to cash in on the word rate.

Or how about this overwritten nonsense from “The Sculptor’s Funeral”?

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my boy! And this is how you’ve come home to me!”

I’m very forgiving of melodrama in fiction, but this is unpardonable corn pudding with an objectively disagreeable sweetness that would be rightly laughed out of any MFA workshop today. The sequence of events here is all wrong. “Drawn from the hearse”? Well, where else would the casket come from? Some giant descending from the heavens? The attempt here to create poignant emotion falls flat with this overwrought dialogue. “My boy” was enough. But we get two in a row, followed by the kind of awful expository dialogue I go out of my way to avoid as a radio dramatist.

And then I read the soul-destroying novels. O Pioneers! was a vicious slog. The Song of the Lark — with its hideous reactionary parochialism and its incessant reliance upon gossip — will have you howling at the ceiling over how stiff and superficial it is. And My Ántonia? You’d honestly be better off spending your time listening to The Knack’s “My Sharona” on repeat for six hours.

Which finally brings us to Death Come for the Archbishop after a lot of throat-clearing. (Look, I’m trying to have fun here. My Cather deep dive was a deeply unpleasant reading experience!)

The common narrative propped up by Cather’s fusty and foolish boosters is that, much like Robert Johnson meeting the Devil, Cather went down to the Southwest (particularly Santa Fe) in the summer of 1925 and came back “reborn” with a renewed “sensitivity” for other cultures. But this, of course, is a lie. And it certainly doesn’t explain why Cather, much like a hopped up Zionist airhead denying Israel’s genocidal complicity, didn’t glom onto the indigenous people who lived in the region, but chose to fixate on the Christian authorities who longed to convert them.

I can see the Cather acolytes arriving at this point in my essay, suggesting that I have deliberately misread Death, which is oh so “sympathetic” to the indigenous people of New Mexico. But at what cost? Depicting Mexicans as noble savages? Emily of It Was Evening All Afternoon arrived at a similar conclusion in 2009. So did Kali Fajardo-Anstine over at LitHub. But why not just go straight to the text to see how docile and obliging the locals are?

When this strange yellow boy played it, there was softness and languor in the wire strings—but there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these men had felt and followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of the banjo player, and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost all form and became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of sand-storm.

A strong argument can be made that Cather was a white supremacist, particularly given her treatment of non-white characters in her odious final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which features hideous Black caricatures in the form of Bluebell and Lizzie. In an October 14, 1940 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher available at the online Willa Cather Archive (I am greatly indebted to Hermione Lee for her endnote), Cather wrote:

I loved especially playing with the darkey speech, which was deep down in my mind exactly like phonograph records. I could remember exactly what they said and the quality of the voice. Just wait till our wise young reviewers, such as Clifton and Louis, sadly call attention to the inconsistency in Till’s and Nancy’s speech,- never knowing that all well trained house servants spoke two languages: one with white people and one with their fellow negroes.

I hope this blatant racism and this boorish boasting helps you to understand why I have felt morally obliged to ratchet up the rage.

When Cather was at work on Death, a Cleveland Press reporter asked her what it was about. She replied, “America works on my mind like light on a photographic plate.” Jesus Christ, could you be any more pretentious? (Hermione Lee informs us that Cather, when making a trip to a writer’s colony as Death squeaked out of her precious mind, was “not remembered for her conviviality.” Which is a gentle way of telling us that Cather was completely fucking insufferable.)

To give Willa the Imperialist Prig some credit, I will say that Death Comes for the Archbishop is slightly better than the early turgid works, although that’s a bit like saying that the Limburger with the least amount of mold that you pick up from the charcuterie plate — you know, that stinky piece you nibble at out of politeness at a party simply because the poor host is blind and she had no idea that she was paring pieces from ancient heads that had been sitting in the fridge since the Clinton Administration — is the bomb.

Death opens with three cardinals and a bishop “talking business” about establishing a new vicarite in New Mexico, which Cather with full colonialist glee tells us is “a part of America recently annexed to the United States.” Bishop Ferrand, the missionary who headed out to the Old West, is ancient and weather-beaten and describes the desolate and fissure-ridden landscape for which these vaguely sinister religious mobsters hope to open up a franchise.

Jean Marie Latour, a thirty-five-year-old naif from Lake Ontario, is enlisted to be the point man converting all the Mexcians and the indigenous people who live in the region. And after these men of the cloth scoff over Latour’s intelligence (or lack thereof), Cather cuts to 1851, where Latour is on his way to Santa Fe. Cather does a decent job describing the limitless “uniform red hills” that Latour takes in on his journey. And there is a modicum of grit in this early chapter that, while a far cry from the satisfying description of Cormac McCarthy at his best, I largely enjoyed.

Unfortunately, after this promising start, my interest waned significantly when Latour began whining about not packing enough water for his journey and losing all of his possessions other than his books. It’s safe that Latour is a far cry from Chaucer’s many priests, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, or even Father John from M*A*S*H. He reveals himself quite rapidly to be an insufferable little shit and I started feeling sorry for Father Joseph Vaillant, Latour’s boyhood friend who accompanies him on the journey to Santa Fe. On the other hand, if you’re friends with a pompous windbag like Latour, then you probably deserve your shared misfortune.

As Father Latour is taken in by some locals, he finds a strange peace in the “bareness and simplicity” of the settlement. He quickly occupies space in a quietly domineering way and listens to the “simple” life stories of these people. I couldn’t help but wonder why a religious man like Latour was so ungrateful, but then I remembered how Cather herself hadn’t exactly been gracious to the many writers who tried to help her. Maybe the fact that Death can be read as a critique of religious imperialism is largely an accident.

Latour starts bragging about how great Americans are. You know, those white people who swooped in and destroyed the Mexican churches and stripped these good people of their religion? Those colonial assholes? They’re great, aren’t they? And, of course, Cather, by way of close narration through Latour, cannot feel any empathy for such debasement.

At this point, I began to loathe Latour with all my heart because of his cluelessness and his insensitivity. And I very much hoped that Cather would deliver on the promise of her title well before I was halfway through the book. Latour is very particular about a meal, telling some indigent to serve him a portion without chili because, as a Frenchman, he does “not like high seasoning.”

Not long after this, Latour is setting up his vicarite. And, of course, it’s Vaillant who is assigned to do all the cooking so that Latour can write endless letters in French. The bishop then takes the opportunity to bitch about the soup. Some friend this motherfucker is.

And even though condemning white privilege with this setup is easier than shooting monkeys in a barrel, I’ll give Cather some points for acknowledging hardscrabble reality:

The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen rivers, who was to carry the Cross into territories yet unknown and unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-drivers, tonight looked apprehensively at his superior and repeated, “No more , Jean. That is far enough.”

I suppose that Cather defenders will defend her belittling of Mexicans by pointing out how Vaillant is described as ugly. Maybe they’ll point to the way that Vaillant and Latour save an old Mexican slave named Sada. But their “help” involves this woman “obeying” the Padre and being ordered to go to church and pray. Sada really doesn’t have any agency other than wanting to return to her religion. And this, quite frankly, is nothing less than an insulting scene of religious tyranny and white privilege. As for the sinister murderer Buck Scales, it says quite a bit about Cather’s dormant xenophobia that his evil is defined equally in terms of interracial marriage: “All white men knew him for a dog and a degenerate—but to Mexican girls, marriage with an American meant coming up in the world. She had married him six years ago, and had been living with him ever since in that wretched house on the Mora trail.”

If you thought Jeanine Cummins was bad, try taking Willa Cather out for a spin. There’s no way I can defend Willa Cather and her repugnant insouciance in 2024. Her prose simply isn’t good enough for me to align myself with Hermione Lee. And I am pleased as punch that I will never have to read this mean and hideous writer ever again.

Next Up: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer!