by Edward Champion

From Here to Eternity (Modern Library #62)

James Jones’s peacetime masterpiece reminds us why it’s important to stick up for the truth-tellers in literature, particularly the novelists who are openly confronting the problems that so many others refuse to scratch at.

(This is the thirty-ninth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Wapshot Chronicle.)

American history has always been a series of tranquil and joyful moments just before some terrible spill of the cosmic wheelbarrow. The ebb and flow of American life, as it has been and as it always will be, can be perceived as a recurring nightmare: of life, love, felicity, and possibility cast asunder in an unsettling uproar claiming some permanent end to innocence. The hanging chads and butterfly ballots ushering in a presidential monster, only to be eclipsed (and even normalized) sixteen years later by an even greater beast, a lusus naturae even more unhinged and more unsettling. The planes hitting the towers. A pandemic wiping out more than one million Americans. And, of course, the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor and stirred America from its slumber, shoving us into the Second World War.

In our rush to wrap our shivering minds in the warm blanket of nostalgia, as we recall epochs that were seemingly safer and stabler, we often forget that living did not stop and progress was not halted by the deafening clamor of sinister cornets warbling from left field. The best artists have always understood that each deep stab of history’s merciless dirk is answered by reflection and repose, of the battered and bruised emerging triumphantly from these setbacks with resilience and rejuvenation.

We were never like that. We were always like that. The push and pull continues unabated by the “winners” snorting with sow-soaked hubris at the top of the media food chain, with scant regard given to the unsettling totality.

Enter James Jones in 1951, whose massive masterpieces From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line are little remembered by anyone under fifty today.

I may very well be the last person under fifty to have signed on for the full James Jones experience. Not even the perspicacious film critic Glenn Kenny finished the Jones doorstopper that he named his thoughtful blog after, but I did.

* * *

From Here to Eternity is a peacetime novel bolstered by a trinity of misfits: a former boxer who grew up poor and who invites trouble named Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (or Prew), a total maniac from Brooklyn who works in the kitchen named Private Angelo Maggio (in other words, a violent and unhinged toxic man who would be immediately canceled, if not arrested on sight, in 2024), and Sergeant Milt Warden, who is having an affair with Karen Holmes, naturally the wife of Captain Dana Holmes, who is the man in charge of G Company. Ther’s also Mess Sergeant Maylon Stark, who, while a minor character in Eternity, I mention here because Jones would take the names and temperaments of these men and reuse them for The Thin Red Line and Whistle, the next two books in his World War II trilogy. So in The Thin Red Line (another Jones masterpiece), Prewitt becomes Witt, Stark changes into Storm, Warden transmutes into Welsh. Then Whistle comes along and Witt is Winch, Prew is Prell, and Stark is Strange. It’s a clever move by Jones to show the interchangeability of certain personality types within the military-industrial complex. Thirty years before Richard Gere famously wailed “I got nowhere else to go!” in An Officer and a Gentleman, Jones understood the painful truth about rudderless men flocking to the military more than anyone.

Mention From Here to Eternity to anyone today and they will probably remember (that is, if they do remember) the famous love scene on the beach with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But as undeniably romantic as this cinematic moment is, I would say that “Re-Enlistment Blues” probably captures the spirit of the book better than the waves sweeping across gorgeous Hollywood actors (and, hey, I’m not going to deny that Lancaster and Kerr are both incredibly sexy in that scene). I’ve taken the liberty of covering the song, if only to remind the world that it was Jones who wrote the lyrics (since fewer people read these days, why not set the record straight on TikTok?):

You see, Jones rightly perceived the military as an all-encompassing instrument designed to turn fuckups into soldiers through often brutal regimentation. (One can see the full unforgiving horrors against the more libertine and free-thinking men on display in the novel’s brutal chapters in the stockade.) In a December 8, 1939 letter to his brother Jeff, Jones wrote, “I, who am better bred than any of these moronic sergeants, am ordered around by them as if I were a robot, constrained to do their bidding. But I can see their point of view. Nine out of every ten men in this army have no more brains than a three year old. The only way they can learn the manual and the drill commands is by constant repetition. It is pounded into their skulls until it is enveloped by the subconscious mind. The tenth man cannot be excepted. He must be treated the same as the others, even if in time he becomes like them.” A little less than four decades later, Jones would hold to this unsettling truth in his compelling memoir, WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering: “Men who had been raised to believe, however erroneously, in a certain modicum of individual free-thinking were being taught by loud, fat, devoted sergeants to live as numbers, by the numbers. Clothes that did not fit, when they could see clothes on the shelves that did fit…Being laughed at, insulted, upbraided, held up to ridicule, and fed like pigs at a trough with absolutely no recourse or rights to uphold their treasured individuality before any parent, lover, teacher or tribune. Harassed to rise at five in the morning, harassed to be in bed by nine-thirty at night.”

When From Here to Eternity dropped in 1951, few novelists — with the possible exception of Richard Aldington’s bracingly sardonic Death of a Hero — had dared to betray this unspoken memorandum of understanding. That the truth arrived in fiction six years after the surrender of Japan suggests that it was meant to be confronted, though not in expedient fashion. Three years before, Norman Mailer had merely presented the loneliness and dehumanization of his soldiers. But Jones was prepared to go much further than this, tackling military life with all of its blunt involutions. And it is testament to Jones’s great talent as a writer that Angelo Maggio — the anarchic id at the center of this massive novel — remains an inexplicably poignant figure, a character who charmed Frank Sinatra and, according to his biographer James Kaplan, caused Ol’ Blue Eyes to brood at night speaking his lines from the book and insisting that only he could play the part. (The role salvaged Sinatra’s then flailing career. Sinatra would go onto win an Academy Award for his performance in the 1953 movie. Indeed, it can be plausibly concluded that Sinatra would never have been Sinatra without James Jones. Without Maggio, Sinatra would have ended up as a forgotten crooner, some footnote in 20th century history.)

* * *

In stitching all these threads together, Jones was hindered by Scribner’s legal team, which demanded a low-salt version of the authentic soldier dialogue. Only a few years before, Norman Mailer had caved to the censors to get The Naked and the Dead published, using “fug” in lieu of a now commonplace word that one hears frequently from the mouths of enthusiastic teenagers (and causing Dorothy Parker to say, upon being introduced to Mailer, “So you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck.'”).

But Jones saw the revision as a creative challenge. In his poignant memoir, James Jones: A Friendship, Willie Morris (who was so tight with Jones that he finished writing the final installment of the World War II trilogy, Whistler, after Jones’s death) got the inside skinny from editor Burroughs Mitchell on how Jones approached this:

It was very hard work; Jim’s ear was so exact that you couldn’t easily remove a word from the dialogue or substitute for it. But he kept doggedly at it, and eventually he began to treat the job as a puzzle, a game, and was delighted with himself when he found solutions. It was characteristic of him, then and afterward, that when an editorial decision was made, a look of anguish would come over his face, he would get up and pace, and finally he’d either accept or say, “I just can’t change that,” looking even more anguished. Finally I reported to Mr. Scribner that we had cut all the fucks we could cut, although not the lawyers’ full quota, and Mr. Scribner cheerfully accepted the situation. That was certainly part of reason why, when Charles Scribner died suddenly, Jim insisted on going to the funeral. He said he knew that Mr. Scribner had been worried about Eternity — but he had gone ahead and published it.

In our present age of sensitivity readers and books being banned or unpublished for spurious reasons, righteous career-destroying ideologues are no less wild-eyed or humorless than their right-wing, anti-art, anti-Critical Race Theory, and casually transphobic counterparts — the kind of regressive dipsticks who wrongly complain about how Russell T. Davies’s new stories for Doctor Who are “too woke” because of pronoun recognition, Davies equipping the TARDIS with a wheelchair ramp (and proudly introducing Ruth Madeley as a disabled UNIT adviser), and the marvelous inclusion of nonbinary characters. But make no mistake: tyranny against expression is not confined to any political affiliation. It is difficult to fathom any modern day corporate publisher who would possess the stones to stick with an author’s artistic vision in the way that Charles Scribner did. (Only four decades after the publication of From Here to Eternity, a gutless vulgarian by the name of Richard E. Snyder, head of Simon & Schuster (which would gobble up the Scribner imprint in 1993), would kibosh the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, before it was picked up by Vintage, where it would become a huge success (and be reinvented by the inventive Mary Harron as an unforgettable film adaptation mocking toxic masculinity, much as Ariel Levy and John Turturro recently adapted Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre for the stage in similar fashion). Thankfully, Snyder had the decency to drop dead of heart failure last June after living a long and spineless life lining the coffers of his corporate overlords by publishing “inoffensive” tomes.)

Jones wandered into the writing world a bit too late to get the full Maxwell Perkins treatment (he famously demanded to see Perkins in person as a young writer; Perkins received him and encouraged him, but passed away before he could devote his editorial energies to the entirety of Eternity), but he did have timing on his side, with the valves of permissible dialogue being slowly loosened in the early 1950s, culminating in the opprobrium that Grace Metalious would receive five years later for Peyton Place.

The uncensored version of From Here to Eternity was published by The Dial Press a few years back and, having read both the original and the uncensored versions, I would say that the latter is far superior. There are small differences, such as Maggio allowing a man to go down on him to land some extra cash:

“Oh, sall right. I admit its nothing like a woman. But its something. Besides, old Hal treats me swell. He’s always good for a touch when I’m broke. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Comes in handy the middle of the month.”

But these restored scenes really tell you about the quiet desperation of soldiers. They wait for payday. They augment their meager pay with card games in the latrine. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on sex workers. And they do this because, well, there is nothing else for them. In her incredibly underrated book Stiffed, Susan Faludi documented this problem in the 1990s from a variety of vantage points and concluded that the repugnant patriarchal cues and the way that American culture is conveniently superficial about anxieties that scar lives is equally applicable to men as well as women. And we cannot even begin to solve the underlying problems unless we are honest about all this. As journalists now lose their jobs and sites like The Messenger close their doors and kill their content without notice, it’s incumbent upon us to find the ballsy artists like Jones and stick up for them even when their honest sentiments are offensive or make us uncomfortable. More than five decades after its publication, From Here to Eternity still makes a valiant case for the need to tell and publish the truth.

Next Up: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop!

by Edward Champion

The Wapshot Chronicle (Modern Library #63)

The great John Cheever is justly celebrated as a short story master, but his novels are often overlooked, disregarded, or ignored. But the sheer weirdness, contradictions, and interesting structural choices make a great case for Wapshot as an enduring literary classic.

(This is the thirty-eighth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Catcher in the Rye.)

Despite focusing almost exclusively on the upper and middle classes in his fiction, John Cheever was that rare New Yorker regular whose short stories never came across as off-puttingly imperious, superficially urbane, or especially pretentious (although he did don a mannered Mid-Atlantic accent for his television appearances; his 1981 appearance with John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show is highly recommended). But to be fair to Cheever, this Quincy native was also good for a number of gentle tales featuring small-town types trying to live out their grandiose dreams in the big city, as seen in “O City of Broken Dreams” and “Clancy in the Tower of Babel.”) One gets the sense from Cheever’s stories and his diaries that, for all of his hard drinking and his tormented sexuality, the man genuinely loved people and marveled over bizarre jewels mined from the commons. His writing voice led many to call him “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” although that appellation doesn’t do full justice to Cheever’s stratospheric talent or surprising range.

This emphasis on pedigree has caused many contemporary readers to align Cheever — much to the understandable chagrin of The Millions‘s Adam O’Fallon Price — with the equally great Raymond Carver, whose penetrating portraits of blue-color realism showed a similar talent for exhuming the irresistible madness buried within the quotidian. (Carver’s baker in “A Small, Good Thing” — with the surreal quality of his incessant phone calls to a grieving couple — could be a Cheever character. And indeed, Cheever and Carver were drinking buddies.) But Cheever worked a slightly less verisimilitudinous room that, even with its quasi-fantastical wainscotting, proved just as truthful as Carver’s grit. Cheever’s finest stories — “The Enormous Radio,” “Torch Song” (one of my personal favorites), and “The Swimmer” — nimbly corral the motley flocks of common anxieties into quietly surrealistic pastures situated somewhere between speculative fiction and magical realism. But Cheever’s bold storytelling strokes (a radio that airs the conversations of neighbors, people who age or who never age in strange ways) never seem to come across as overly conceptual or call attention to themselves because his characters are so vivid in their behavior. (“I wish you wouldn’t leave apple cores in the ashtrays,” says one of the overheard people in “The Enormous Radio,” “I hate the smell.” As a former smoker who practiced significant pulmonary zest while slowly killing himself, I’ve never seen anyone do this — not even the chain-inhaling slobs I shivered outside with in my dorm room days.) It’s an emphatic lesson that seems to have eluded priapic spec-fic hacks like David Brin, Orson Scott Card, and John Scalzi, who are more interested in bloviating and showing how “clever” they are rather than practicing the art of writing fiction, much less humility, in any notable manner (and, in Card’s case, a monotonously homophobic one).

Buoyed by his elegant and subtly expansive prose, Cheever somehow inoculated himself against being typed — especially after the success of The Wapshot Chronicle, the masterpiece on the Modern Library list which beckons this essay and the novel that got me so passionate about Cheever again that I reread the full oeuvre, delaying yet another installment and once again hedging the unknown number of days I have left in my life against the completion of this insanely ambitious project. Bullet Park is a laudable though not entirely successful effort to break out of the zany New England métier. But Falconer? That novel is a fucking knockout that truly shows just how much range Cheever had. He captured the speech and mannerisms of prisoners in a way completely beyond the abilities of Updike or, for that matter, many of the smug and privileged novelists you see on BlueSky boasting daily about how “woke” they are, even as they can be observed in real life nervously crossing the street whenever they see a Black person approaching them. Decades before Alan Hollinghurst, Cheever had this knack for describing the seedier pastimes of sexuality as if this was the most beautiful thing in the world. But he also rightfully earned respect from the mainstream literary establishment at a time in which writers wrangling with anything even remotely high-concept were often pushed needlessly and ignominiously into the dodgy shadows of the pulp markets.

While Cheevermania thankfully remains somewhat alive in the 2020s — with both Mary Gaitskill and Emma Cline stumping for him at the last New Yorker festival — note how Vulture reporter Brandon Sanchez emphasizes the short stories while shutting out the novels. Even my fellow Cheever booster O’Fallon Price, who rightly points to the “binary choice between dull routine and utter chaos” frequently explored in Cheever’s fiction, offers nothing more than an oblique reference to Bullet Park in his Cheever essay. None of these people seem to have heeded the wisdom of the late great critic John Leonard, who demanded that we express love and generosity to a sui generis talent (just as he did in his review of Cheever’s final novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, which is still very solid Cheever, particularly the ice skating and supermarket scenes).

The Wapshot Chronicle is utterly breathtaking, often very funny, and poignant. Less seasoned readers have dismissed Wapshot as the work of a “master short story writer teaching himself how to write a novel” and, while they are not wrong on this point, I think this is a significant underestimation of what Cheever has accomplished here. Wapshot deserves to be held high with the same adulation reserved for his short stories. For one thing, Wapshot is also the first Book of the Month Club selection with the word “fuck” in it. This “transgression,” which must have scandalized pearl-clutching moralists of the lowest order, surely gives Cheever a small amount of punk rock streetcred.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

That silly advice comes from retired sea captain, endearing crank, and old patriarch Leander Wapshot. Stylistically speaking, Leander’s fascinating clippy patois is what stands out on the first reading. But there’s also a shrewd piss-take on Booth Tarkington‘s device of an omniscient storyteller who makes his presence known with picayune details of family lines and furtive glimpses into certain subcultures:

It is the perhaps in the size of things that we are most often disappointed and it may be because the mind itself is such a huge and labyrinthine chamber that the Pantheon and the Acropolis turn out to be smaller than we had expected.

Wapshot was not the first time that Cheever used this trick. His 1955 story “Just One More Time” does this as well. But with Wapshot, the almost satirical formality serves to create an epic structure for the eccentric Wapshot family to run wild. (And in the case of Leander’s two sons, Moses and Coverly, they literally flock to many corners of the nation — particularly Coverly after he becomes a Taper and is sent to far-off regions: the military base, in Cheever’s hands, is sent up gloriously and Cheever would continue with this in The Wapshot Scandal by satirizing the McCarthy trials.) Much like the fantastical concepts in his stories anchored strange behavior, so too does the Tarkingtonesque narrator frame the family adventures.

I also loved the marvelously quirky Cousin Honora, who controls the family pursestrings and who has a highly unusual method of paying for her bus fare:

Honora doesn’t put a dime into the fare box like the rest of the passengers. As she says, she can’t be bothered. She sends the transportation company a check for twenty dollars each Christmas. They’ve written her, telephoned her and sent representatives to her house, but they’ve gotten nowhere.

My only minor quibble about Wapshot — and this is a point that a certain misogynistic predator who was forced to bail from the publishing world lacked the acumen to consider — is how Melissa, the woman who marries Moses, is short-changed by Cheever. It’s clear that she is not happy in the marriage. Cheever, to his credit, would make a noble stab to atone for this in The Wapshot Scandal by having her run off with a 19-year-old grocery boy named Emile. But even in the sequel, I felt that Cheever didn’t quite flesh out this character. It’s not that Cheever couldn’t write women (see Honora, for one) or didn’t understand what it was like to be trapped in a thankless marriage. (Julia Weed in “The Country Husband” is a far better portrayal of this problem than Melissa.) But sometimes the best pilot can’t always stick the landing. And I’m not about to pull one of those Zoomer hissy fits and cancel Cheever simply because he fumbled an important issue. Especially because there’s so much to admire about Wapshot: its wit, its heart, the way that it embraces certain strains of Southern literature only to abandon this tone once Moses and Coverly go off and live their lives, its beautiful depiction of naivety at every age, and the hilarious tally of weird accidental deaths. I also feel obliged to point to Steven Wandler’s interesting essay in which he argues that the two Wapshot novels are similar while presenting contradictory views of the world. Another literary Ed — one who has greater cachet than this irksome Brooklynite — has made a savvy argument that much of this stemmed from the contradictions of Cheever’s life. And aren’t contradictions exactly the reason why we reread great novels?

Next Up: James Jones’s From Here to Eternity!

by Edward Champion

Anil Dash’s Unhinged Death Wish, Libel, and Harassment Campaign Against Me (With Receipts)

BlueSky is no different from Twitter in terms of harassment and abuse. But instead of MAGA trolls wishing death and self-harm on people, the BlueSky types who gleefully harass and wish death on people are ostensible “liberals” like self-described “tech entrepreneur” Anil Dash.

[NOTE: For the TLDR crowd, I have served up a 60 second video summary of this dispute on YouTube.]

On Monday, January 29, 2024, starting at 2:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, an unhinged BlueSky user put up 91 posts about me in a nine hour period. These posts were libelous, untrue, defamatory, and designed to harass and discredit me. They whipped up the collective fury of hundreds of other BlueSky users. (BlueSky has refused to respond to my inquiries or resolve this in any way. The social media company, run by Jay Graber, did not take any steps to mitigate this. It was nothing but radio silence under Graber’s watch.) I am specifically not naming this individual because I have reason to believe that she may be unwell.

But I am going to name somebody else — a person with 17.7K followers in BlueSky and more than half a million followers on The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, a figure who claims on his webpage that he’s “trying to make the technology world more thoughtful, creative, and humane” but who demonstrated nothing in the way of humane qualities in the last twenty-four hours — who was involved in this imbroglio and who seized the moment to amplify this extremely bizarre character assassination campaign against me.

If you’re wondering what I could have done to elicit such an attack on me, here is the “offensive” jokey BlueSky post, with the other party’s name removed:

The post from the original user read as follows:

Social media etiquette reminder: there are precisely zero circumstances under which “jokingly” doing the exact infuriating behavior someone is complaining about is not just as infuriating as the actual underlying behavior.

The point I was trying to make (which I apparently failed at) — and I want to be clear that I did not know who this user was or her disabled status at the time I replied; I am not in the habit of mocking disabled people and her post simply popped into my algorithm — was that satire and parody are rooted in a form of mimicking language and behavior. I did not intend to disparage or belittle the individual. It is clear from the preposterous imagery of having an assistant “gather[ing] tomatoes, pitchforks, and an angry mob” that all this was jocular in tone. But this individual had every intention of smearing me. She has claimed that she has merely quoted my words, but she did a lot more than that, calling me “fuckhead,” making a series of unfounded allegations, and using the dog whistle language of “respecting boundaries” while urging people to block me. Fine, I thought. It’s a free country. I thought nothing of her blocking me, leaving the matter alone. Until a number of people started bombarding me with hateful replies and calls for my death on every social media platform. It didn’t take me very long to find the source.

She carried on with her fusillade all day, even after I had issued a public apology on my Mastodon account for any misunderstanding and even after I had deleted my BlueSky account sometime around 4:00 PM. I am still legitimately unclear what I did to this individual to warrant such a strong vituperative reaction and I reiterate my contrition.

This individual’s crazed fixation on me was bolstered and amplified by Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick and Ken White (the man behind Popehat). And their considerable online sway (Masnick has 50K followers on Twitter and Popehat had 317k followers before they both left that Musk-steered apocalyptic social media ranch) helped to legitimize the character assassination campaign against me. Masnick and White, however, kept their criticisms to legally permissible ones (although White, whom I have never met or interacted with before Monday and who is not a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist, speculated on my mental health).

But the tech figure who stepped over the line (and went well beyond the individual who created this firestorm) and entered into the realm of incessant harassment and death wishes upon me was none other than Fastly’s Anil Dash, who took the opportunity to impute — sans receipts, names, or evidence — that I had “maligned good friends of [his] including one just a few days after he passed.” Dash is perfectly at liberty to call me a “complete scumbag,” but I draw the line at unfounded defamation. (When asked specifically by email about the identities of these “good friends,” Mr. Dash did not produce any names or links to what I had written. I wrote, “Not that I expect you to perceive me as a human being, but, for the record, I’m always happy to clear matters up.” And sure enough he didn’t do either of these two things. I can only conclude that Dash was lying through his teeth about the “good friends” of his that I had “maligned,” given how he lied later about other details in our exchange. I have had no desire to be part of the tech world for more than twenty years and I have stayed away from it. So I cannot imagine what “good friends” he is talking about.)

Now the Fastly Code of Conduct specifies that the company that Dash works for “does not tolerate harassment” and notes that “we operate honestly, ethically, and transparently.” And the BlueSky Community Guidelines likewise states to treat others with respect and specifically prohibits “encouraging self-harm and suicide.”

Dash would proceed to violate both of these codes.

In a post alluding to my suicide attempt in 2014, Mr. Dash also proceeded to wish me dead.

He would be more explicit about this in an email I received from Mr. Dash on January 30, 2024 at 10:21 PM:

I had emailed Mr. Dash on Monday night at 8:20 PM EST, politely requesting that he stop and writing in part:

Anil, I blocked you on all social media. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I think I’ve made one snarky comment tops in relation to you in twenty years.

And indeed, in examining my records, there was one email exchange between Mr. Dash and me on November 18, 2008, which I admittedly replied to in an uncharitable manner at the time. In a 10:20 email to Mr. Dash on Tuesday morning, I wrote, “You reached out to me decades ago by email (November 18, 2008, to be precise) and I responded in a churlish and uncharitable way that I wouldn’t do now. (Since that is the only tangible evidence of what a “bad boy” I’ve been to you, I hereby apologize for a dispatch from sixteen years ago, when you and I were totally different people.) Aside from one Mastodon post lightly ribbing you, I haven’t said anything about you until you started smearing me.”

Dash’s initial response to my Monday night email was:

In other words, Dash categorized all of his BlueSky posts about me as “satire posts” [sic]. When, in fact, the post he had made about me on January 29, 2024 at 5:41 PM — again, without receipts and without names — led a number of people to believe in his unsupported and unfounded claims. And when people believe in a false claim, this cannot be categorized as satire. It skirts into the more baleful terrain of libel and defamation. It is also deeply inappropriate to call for violence or self-harm against someone, which Dash has now done twice against me — even demanding that I “quote” him.

In my reply to Dash’s Tuesday morning email, I pointed this out:

So, just to be clear, if I wrote a “satirical” story (not that I would) in which deranged maniacs chopped up your son Malcolm into tiny little bits shortly after raping your wife Alaina, you’d be fine with this, eh, Anil?

and I further went onto say

There’s a difference between the ridiculous suggestion of me having an assistant who will rustle up tomatoes, pitchforks, and an angry mob (who would believe that?) and you making an unfounded claim where you invoke friends. The first image is predicated in ridiculous imagery and obvious satire. The second (yours) is not satire at all. The reactions from your post were BELIEVED. You caused people to believe in your false statements. Your false statements were understood by your audience to be referring to me and to be true. That’s what’s going to count in a court of law. That’s libel and defamation, sir. Please familiarize yourself.

In a post on January 29, 2024, at 9:12 PM, Dash claimed that he would never make light of my suicide attempt or express a desire for me to kill myself. But as I have abundantly demonstrated, this is exactly what he did. Presumably, this post was a postmodern riff on the so-called “”satire defense” often employed by trolls. The fact that Dash thinks so lightly and dismissively of the impact of his own public expressed wishes for me to kill myself further reveals his intentional malice and his eagerness to inflict emotional distress on me.

The correspondence between Dash and me was conveniently and dishonestly twisted into a series of lies in which Dash falsely insinuated that I desired to “[chop] up [his] child and sexually [assault] his wife” when I had specifically stated that I was opposed to such violence and any depiction of this on the Internet:

In short, Anil Dash deliberately and dishonestly distorted the dispute between us. He continued to wish me self-harm and suicide. And there will be no repercussions for his abusive and harassing behavior because he is tightly connected within the tech world.

To reiterate, BlueSky did not shut down this harassment, despite my efforts to report these abusive posts on multiple burner accounts. This was “trial by social media” and Mr. Dash refused to provide receipts.

This also demonstrates that BlueSky is little more than a Twitter clone, with all of its attendant abuse. And the abusers on BlueSky aren’t MAGA trolls, but people like Anil Dash, who have influence in creating narratives and false impressions. But they traffic in the same casual hate, libel, and discrediting of individuals that is found on what is now known as X. The only difference is that the cyberbullies are the ones who falsely boast about how “humane” and “ethical” they are when they are anything but this.

1/31/24 UPDATE: In 2013, Dash posted an article on Medium, in which he outlined the principles behind online harassment that he practiced this week to a tee: “Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation.” Dash willfully escalated the situation in this manner and then proceed to send along repeated messages to me, hoping that I would commit self-harm. As someone who lives with the disability of depression, this, incidentally, is precisely the kind of nasty disability harassment that Dash purports to stand against. And there’s more hypocrisy from Dash in this December 28, 2021 tweet. Keep in mind that I received death wishes and harassment from Dash in a deeply invasive way. Dash is not a poster boy for a “decent” person.

Here is more folderol from Dash in 2019: “If we’re going to build a new web, and a new internet, that respects our privacy and security, that doesn’t amplify abuse and harassment and misinformation, we’re going to need to imagine models of experiences and communities that could provide a better alternative.” As I have abundantly demonstrated, Dash amplified abuse, harassment, and misinformation against me. He still has not produced the “receipts” that he allegedly has against me.

In this Time article from 2016, Dash is quoted in a manner, showing that he is fully aware of the impact of abuse and harassment on depressives, which he deliberately amplified against me: ““I’m just some dude on the Internet, and somebody will tell me probably once or twice a day to kill myself. I think if I look back to my late teens, early twenties when I was struggling with depression—if I had endured somebody telling me once or twice a day to kill myself, as happens now—it would have worked.”

2/2/24 UPDATE: This article has been slightly altered to include one additional example of Mr. Dash’s campaign to harass me and inflict emotional distress on me.

by Edward Champion

The Abecedarian Diaries of Edward Champion

It was going to be one of my greatest passion projects, but Sheila Heti swooped in and claimed it as her own! To set the record straight, I have revealed the 100% true origin story of The Alphabet Diaries!

[PREFACE TO THE DIARIES: Sometime in 2021, I ran into Eric Chinski, who was then the editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I bought Chinski a drink. Chinski then snarled at me and screamed, “Why is this motherfucking mixologist serving bottom-shelf liquor?” I gave Chinski a hug. Because I knew he had fastidious standards: in drinks and in books. Then he condemned my hug as being “not sufficiently supportive.” I flashed a look at the jazz drummer, who was between sets on the small dais, and he shrugged — this after I had tipped him ten bucks while the affluent people around me didn’t even acknowledge him at all. Chinski then mentioned something about Charles Sumner being caned by Preston Brooks and how this was a better way of resolving disputes than the system that we had now. (These are the sorts of subjects that obnoxious literary people tend to bandy about.) And somehow the two of us were kicked out of the bar. Chinski had made the mistake of leaving his coat inside the bar. And the bouncer refused to let either of us in to reclaim said coat. As I observed Chinski’s face turn blue from pneumonia, I gave him my coat. Chinski stopped shivering, but seemed oblivious to my own lack of protection against the elements. (I would spend the next week in bed, holed up with the flu, with only a Costco package of Chunky Soup and a cat I had kidnapped from one of my neighbors for company.) Chinski asked me to call him a Lyft and I did. As we waited for the driver, I told Chinski that I had access to one of my diaries, but that this was a special diary — one that extended into 2029. Chinski was intrigued by the idea and suggested that I put all of the diary entries in order. “We could publish it as a book! The Abecedarian Diaries of Edward Champion! It could be your comeback!” “Who on earth would be interested in anything I had to say?” I asked. “Oh, they wouldn’t,” said Chinski. “But they would be very interested in knowing what awaited them in the future!” Then, as the Lyft sailed up to the curb, Chinski tossed me my coat, offered me a fourteen ingredient recipe for restorative cocoa, and said that the people at FSG would be in touch with me. Well, as you can see from the entries, things went a little sideways. And it was Sheila Heti who used her mercenary business skills and literary connections to claim my idea as her own. And would you believe it? She changed “Abecedarian” to “Alphabetical.” The nerve! These days, I try not to get involved in literary disputes, but I do feel compelled to share you some of the diary entries that I passed on to Chinski. I shall let the reader infer the veracity of my book project. But I still maintain that I was first!]

The Abecedarian Diaries (2019-2029)

Ambulance sirens nonstop. Three people I know are now dead of this COVID thing. How much Minesweeper and Wolfenstein can I play to distract myself from crying? (April 4, 2020)

* * *

Another message from Sheila Heti in the office. Why does she keep calling me? More importantly, how does the receptionist maintain a supply of those pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips? I didn’t even know they were manufactured anymore, much less sold in stores. I’m not sure why Heti keeps calling and I have no idea what she wants or how she tracked down where I work. But I am worried. This deal with FSG barely came together and now Chinski is telling me on the q.t. that they can’t publish me because I’ve been canceled multiple times. But you know the literary world. Everything is constructed on a delicate framework. I’m tempted to call Heti back, but the last time I ran into her (at a mellow board games cafe in The Annex, where she was the only one not playing games and complained about agents and publishers asking her to write fiction to her male companion), she was insufferable, as she always is. (July 9, 2022)

* * *

Biden really fumbled the debate tonight. He’s looking older and frailer. And most people I’ve talked with don’t have any confidence in him. But he’s the only candidate we have. Senescence or fascism. These are the choices. Still I can’t help but wonder why these Republican front-runners keep committing suicide. Yeah, I know they keep unsealing these court documents, but surely it’s not that bad, is it? This is the third guy who Biden has had to debate after the first two killed themselves. And I guess we’ll find out what’s in these documents once the historians roll up their sleeves and publish their books in the next ten years! (October 22, 2024)

* * *

Big news from my agent! Chinski is all in with the alphabetical diaries book! He says that people will at long last understand me! FSG can’t pay me much, but it is a solid boost to one’s confidence to have some publisher interested. Granted, I don’t think that anything I have to say in my diaries is especially important. And I think rearranging my diary entries into alphabetical order isn’t going to reveal anything especially interesting about me. (November 4, 2021)

* * *

Can you believe it? They finally got Gaetz. Again! Took ’em long enough. Now if only the people of Florida would stop electing convicted felons to office. (March 4, 2028)

* * *

Carl Wilson was kind enough to return my call this morning. He says my best bet as a writer is to write a nice little book for 33+1⁄3 on Taylor Swift. If I have the Swifties in my corner, maybe I have a shot at salvaging the FSG deal. Although it looks like Johnson is sticking with Heti and claiming that Chinski was drunk and out of his fucking mind when he first agreed to publish The Alphabetical Diaries of Edward Champion as a book. (April 14, 2023)

* * *

Didn’t hear back from Chinski. That’s two weeks. I’m getting a little worried. My agent is also making calls. I haven’t called back Heti, although a contact I have who is close to Margaux Williamson suggest she’s behind this. As is that litblogger who she used to hook up with. I’m lying low for now and hoping for the best. JL and SR tell me that this is the kind of nonsense one should expect before publication. But this very much feels like an American Dirt-style inside job. And the hell of it is that this was just me rearranging a few of my diary entries in alphabetical order. (November 9, 2022)

* * *

Heti’s voicemails are growing increasingly deranged. Constant shouts. And is she playing mariachi music very loud in the back? Anyways, she’s claiming that she would ensure that I would never get published again if I didn’t abdicate the Alphabetical Diaries rights back to her. (Uh, like I was getting published before?) My agent said that Heti has us over a barrel. He also told me that he could no longer represent me as a client. So it looks like my book proposal is about to be plundered by that 46-year-old literary tyrant in Toronto. And it looks like the pub date is February 2024. Just as I thought I was getting a fucking break. Oh well. I still have my audio drama to record. (January 15, 2023)

* * *

I dropped down on my knee and she said yes! After four decades of being single, I’m finally going to get hitched! Never thought I was the marrying type, but she’s the right one and I can’t believe my luck! (July 3, 2025)

* * *

I’m now down twenty pounds ever since I stopped smoking. No desire for a cigarette anymore, but the endorphin rush of exercise has become all-consuming. What kind of man am I turning into? My younger self wouldn’t recognize this man. (March 24, 2025)

* * *

Met a fellow on the subway who had no teeth. I asked him to recite the Gettysburg Address and he took a swing at me. I can’t say I blame him. I’ve sometimes been tempted to growl at anyone who asks me to perform the “And I will go on hurting you” speech from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but it’s so much better to just get it over with. Do the goddamned monologue and remain congenial. Know what I mean? If they want my Khan Noonien Singh rather than my King Lear, it’s not my fault that they can’t appreciate my storm speech! (February 4, 2023)

* * *

Sony said yes! I can’t believe it. They are releasing my debut album, Dirges, Ballads, Ditties Goddammit from a Bald Man!, in the fall of 2026! And I’m getting a ten city tour! I asked my agent — the new one who actually knows how to tie a double Windsor knot — if he was sure that I could pack mid-sized venues like this. I’m a middle-aged man, for fuck’s sake. And he said that the publicity machine believes me to the second coming of Kris Kristofferson with this new material. He also told me that I’ll need to grow a beard and be “more sensitive” in interviews — whatever the hell that means! Man, if I knew it would have gone down like this, I never would have attempted to be part of the literary racket! (August 18, 2025)

* * *

The former literary biographer so bereft of purpose that he shoots up the Mall of America, killing 45 people before turning the gun on himself. A tragic day. I remember a happy day years ago in which [REDACTED] took me to the Mall and I ended up buying a goofy Zygons shirt. Making calls to peeps in the Twin Cities this morning to make sure they’re okay. (May 19, 2026)

* * *

Went home last night with a cute woman who locked eyes with me last night at the Cobra Club. Woke up this morning and learned that she had herpes. After cooking her breakfast and being forced to give her $200 (she apparently took compromising photos of me as I slept), I called Planned Parenthood to schedule an appointment to test and remove any potential genital warts. But apparently there’s a lot of this thing going around and the first available appointment is three months from now. (November 21, 2019)

by Edward Champion

James Joyce (Modern Library Nonfiction #73)

Richard Ellmann’s book on James Joyce may be the greatest literary biography of all time, but will we ever truly know the full mystique behind the great Irish bard?

(This is the twenty-seventh entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: Florence Nightingale.)

“Mr. Joyce, first of all, is a little bourgeois Irishman of provincial tastes who has spent a lifetime on the continent of Europe in a completely fruitless attempt to overcome the Jesuit bigotry, prejudice, and narrowness of his childhood training. Mr. Joyce began his literary career as a fifth-rate poet, from there proceeded to become a seventh-rate short-story writer, graduated from his mastery in this field into a ninth-rate dramatist, from this developed into a thirteenth-rate practitioner of literary Mumbo-Jumboism which is now held in high esteem by the Cultured Few and I believe is now engaged in the concoction of a piece of twenty-seventh-rate incoherency, as if the possibilities in this field had not already been exhausted by the master’s preceding opus.” — Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

James Joyce was probably the greatest writer of the 20th century, although opinions vary. (Many of today’s young whipper-snappers sound astonishingly similar to a dead-inside academic like Thomas Wolfe’s Mr. Malone when dispensing their rectal-tight rectitude and uncomprehending pooh-poohs on social media.) But as a wildly ambitious literary athlete nearing fifty (353 books read so far this year, with a little more than a week left), I cannot think of any other writer whom I have returned to with such regularity and gusto. Even the dreaded “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses, which caused at least six hundred grad students to faint from fatigue in the last year (and a good dozen young scholars to permanently lose their minds), demands that you peruse it anew to appreciate its multitudinous parodies.

Only a handful of living writers can summon a similar obsession in me through the power of their words. But even when these hypergraphic bards descend from the Mount with their thick portentous volumes, they are hopelessly outmatched by the Dublin bard’s mighty polyglot yardstick. (Certainly Anthony Burgess spent his prolific literary career forever lost in Joyce’s formidable fug and forever resented the fact that his best known work, A Clockwork Orange, with its captivating NADSAT, caught on, perhaps because it represented some attempt to mimic Joyce’s word-soaked playfulness.)

When I visited the Martello Tower at Sandycove Point not long before the pandemic, it was the closest thing that an atheist like me has ever had to a religious experience. It had never occurred to me — a relentlessly abused white trash kid who fought off bullies (and still has to do so in his forties) when not filling his voracious noggin with too many books, a reader from the age of two, an accidental provocateur who still manages to piss off PhDs and varying mediocre literary types whenever I quote long passages from memory culled from books they claim to have read but have somehow forgotten — that I would ever have the divine privilege of standing at the very location where “Telemachus” begins. My first walk alongside the Mississippi River last summer in deference to another literary hero of mine was close, but Joyce was the clear winner when it came to summoning such heartfelt psychogeographical wonder. As I sauntered along the swerve of shore to bend of Scotsman’s Bay back to the Dublin train, I trembled with tears of joy, feeling great shudders push me into a state of awe that I did not know was writhing within me. I simply could not believe it. I had already been impressed by the social code of the great Irish people, who would always give you at least five minutes of banter and who were never shy in expressing their opinions and who immediately unlocked the key to further appreciating “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” through their innate conversational finesse. But was I actually standing in the same room in which Samuel Trench (the basis for Haines) had shot at an imaginary panther that had plagued him in his sleep? And was that truly Joyce’s guitar? The good people who run this landmark were incredibly kind to this wildly voluble and incredibly excited Brooklynite. I flooded their robust Irish souls with endless questions and an irrepressible giddiness. A kind woman, who did her best to suppress laughter over my ostentatious literary exuberance, remarked that they had not seen such a visitor display such bountiful passion in months.

But I am and always will be a Joyce stan. I own five Joyce T-shirts, including an artsy one in which the opening words of Finnegans Wake are arranged in a pattern matching one of Joyce’s most iconic photographs. Before I deleted all of my TikTok accounts, my handles were various riffs on Joyce’s most difficult volume. There has rarely been a week in which I have not thought about Ulysses or “The Dead” or, on a whim or in need of a dependable method to restore my soul, picked up my well-thumbed copy of Finnegans Wake and recited pages and laughed my head off. When I went through the roughest patches of my life nine years ago, it was James Joyce who helped save me. I reread Ulysses while living in a homeless shelter. And had I not had that vital volume on me to renew my fortitude and passion, it is quite likely that I would be dead in a ditch somewhere and that the words I am presently writing would not exist.

So I’m obviously already in the tank for Joyce and deeply grateful to him. He has proven more reliable and loyal to me than my toxic sociopathic family. These moments I have chronicled would be enough. But Richard Ellmann hath made my cup runneth over. He somehow achieved the unthinkable, writing what is probably the best literary biography of all time. Other biographers have combed through archives and badgered aging sources, hoping to stitch their tawdry bits with dubious “scholarship.” Small wonder that Joyce himself referred to these highfalutin ransackers, who have more in common with TMZ reporters than academics, as “biografiends.”

But one cannot lay such a mildewed wreath at Ellmann’s feet. There are very few details in Ellmann’s book that do not relate directly to the work. We learn just how invaluable Stanislaus Joyce was to his brother. Stanislaus — an adept peacemaker who documented his fractious fraternal relationship in his own book, My Brother’s Keeper — is liberally excerpted. If Stanislaus hadn’t pushed back hard on the alleged “Russian” feel of Joyce’s great short story “Counterparts,” would we have had “The Dead”? (“The Dead” was written three years after the other fourteen tales contained in Dubliners.) To cite just one of many Ellmann’s cogent connections between Joyce’s life and work, we learn that Edy Boardman — Gertie McDowell’s friend in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses — represented faithful recreations of neighbors that the Joyce family knew on North Richmond Street and that “the boy that had the bicycle always riding up and down in front of her window” was, in fact, a callout to one Eddie Boardman, who had the first pneumatic-tired bike in the hood. Joyce’s crazed jealousy towards any man whom he suspected had designs on Nora Barnacle — with his insecure interrogations of Nora by letter and in person — are duly chronicled. The boy that Nora had dated before Joyce came along was Sonny Bodkin (who died tragically young of tuberculosis) and she was initially attracted to Joyce because of their close physical resemblance. And while Joyce was forward-thinking when it came to presenting Jewish life in Dublin (and arguably creating one of the most fully realized Jewish heroes in literature with Leopold Bloom), his regressive masculinity could not stand the notion that his great love’s heart had stirred long before he came along. And yet, even with his nasty and unfair and unreasonable accusations, he was able to find a way to broach this in fiction with Gretta Conroy recalling her dead lover Michael Furrey in “The Dead.” It is often the darkest personal moments that fuel the best of fiction.

And let’s talk about that ugly side of Joyce. The great Dublin exile was also an unapologetic leech, a shrewd manipulator, and a master of dodging creditors. He fantasized about pimping his wife Nora out to other men while also being naive enough to believe Vincent Cosgrave’s claim that Cosgrave was sleeping with Nora before him in the fateful summer of 1904, nearly sabotaging his relationship with a series of angsty transcontinental missives. For better or worse, Joyce refused to see the full extent of his poor daughter Lucia’s troubles. He treated many who helped him very poorly. And, of course, he despised explaining his work. He wanted to keep the scholars busy for centuries. And he succeeded. Here we are still discussing him, still mesmerized by him. Even when his life and work are often infuriating.

If there is any weakness to Ellmann’s formidable scholarship, it is with the women who were vital to Joyce’s life. Ellmann was so focused on finding precise parallels between Joyce’s life and work — but usually only including Jim and his brother Stanislaus at the center — that he often portrays these invaluable lieutenants in superficial terms — that is, if he even mentions them at all. Let us not forget that Joyce was a man terrified of dogs, violence, and thunderstorms. The women in his life empathized with the effete qualities of this indisputable genius and provided financial and scholarly resources for Joyce to continue his work, even when they found Finnegans Wake baffling and not to their taste. Perhaps most criminally, there is no mention in Ellmann’s book of Myrsine Moschos (who was Lucia Joyce’s lover at one point), the dutiful woman who toiled at the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Company and spent long days in the dank chambers of Parisian libraries, sifting through decaying volumes that often crumbled to dust in search of obscure words and other arcane lexical associations that Joyce included in Finnegans Wake. Moschos often returned from these scholarly journeys so exhausted that Sylvia Beach — arguably the greatest bookseller in all of human history and the woman who took significant risks to get Ulysses published — had stern words for Joyce about Moschos’s health.

In 2011, Gordon Bowker published a biography — something of a quixotic project, given the long imposing shadow cast by Ellmann — that was more inclusive of Nora Barnacle, Sylvia Beach, and Harriet Shaw Weaver. But I do recommend Brenda Maddox’s Nora, Carol Loeb Schloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (with significant reservations), and Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation as volumes that fill in these significant gaps that Ellmann, in his efforts to portray Joyce as his own master, often failed to address. (Even Jo Davidson, the sculptor who was instrumental in making the New York theatrical run of Joyce’s play Exiles happen, is merely afforded a footnote by Ellmann.)

Can one literary biography be the all-encompassing volume that captures a life? Even one that was as complicated as Joyce’s? Perhaps not. But Ellmann has certainly come closest. Now that Joyce’s famously hostile grandson Stephen has passed away and the copyright for much of Joyce’s work has at long last been released into the public domain, it’s possible that another biographer will be better situated to come closer to revealing the Joyce mystique without being strangled by the bitter hands of some unremarkable apple twice removed from the great tree. But I doubt that any future scholar will match Ellmann. For all of his modest limitations, he was the right man at the right time to capture a seminal literary life in perspicacious and tremendously helpful form.

(Next Up: Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels!)