Tag / Reading

by Edward Champion

Parade’s End (Modern Library #57)

Ford Madox Ford’s introspective tetralogy has been held up as a major work of literature for decades, but Ford’s leaden dialogue and one-note characters are embarrassingly regressive in the 21st century.

(This is the forty-fourth entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Age of Innocence.)

Very few people read Ford Madox Ford (née Ford Madox Hueffer) these days and there are salubrious and soul-preserving reasons why this is so. He’s the rare “great writer” who has as much relevance in the twenty-first century as some huckster trying to sell you an anti-garroting cravat. Parade’s End is ostensibly about the psychological effects of World War I, but, even on my second read of this plodding tetralogy, I found myself revisiting Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and even Rebecca West’s underrated The Return of the Soldier — all far more poignant and perspicacious volumes into how the Great War shaped human history. If anything, Parade’s End is an unwelcome reminder that the crusty white dudes who concocted the Modern Library canon were more motivated by what certain insiders deemed “great literature” rather than bona-fide literary standards.

Of course, I am merely one man on a literary journey — perhaps, more accurately, an asshole on the Internet with an opinion. Even so, when I posted a photo on my Instagram story of me wincing while holding up the Ford omnibus (complete with the unanticipated aesthetic touch of a bandage taped to my forehead, the result of a shaving accident rather than a sustained session in which I repeatedly banged my noggin against a stop sign pole, although my head often felt more like the latter while reading Parade’s End), a friend pointed out that she had indeed suffered with me when she had taken a stab with Ford. Her surprise revelation, delivered in a dramatic “Luke, I am your father” timbre, helped me to feel less alone. Yes, Ford Madox Ford had been dead for a good eighty-seven years and was thus an easy target for a cranky middle-aged bald dude like me who really wanted to write about Kerouac or Faulkner rather than this guy. But our bond of friendship became tighter, cemented in some shared reading agony that we had not hitherto known about. We shook our fists into the air and condemned the dreaded surname “Tietjens.”

You see, only the stodgiest tastemakers imaginable would have the stonecold cruelty to recommend this dull and insufferable perorater to some starry-eyed young reader hoping to secure a foothold in the daunting Modern Library canon. It’s especially aggravating that I have to deal with Ford not once, but twice, on this infernal list. Yes, I am fated to suffer through The Good Soldier when we get to ML 30.  I am not happy about this. But I did take a ridiculous literary oath fifteen years ago and I am a man of my word. This slimmer and more potent novel is admittedly a bit better than Parade’s End — “better” in the way that getting swiftly kicked in the balls is preferable to having a limb sawed off.

But as a graying though exuberant Gen Xer, I am duty-bound to tell any enthusiastic Zoomer or tap-dancing millennial that they would be better off watching Sam Levinson’s exploitative television series Euphoria than reading Ford Madox Ford. It can be sufficiently argued that the only reason that the 2012 BBC television adaptation of Parade’s End was memorable at all is because the brilliant Tom Stoppard (may he rest in peace) rearranged the events and added new scenes and dialogue — most tellingly taking on an “unfaithfully faithful” approach.

Who reads this man today? Perhaps a few superannuated Ford stans can be found whispering “Tietjens” as they slap their fading chits onto lonely numbers in moribund bingo hall parlors swarming with smoke. But I cannot in good conscience join this gloomy coterie of literary losers. These Ford boosters have so deluded themselves into blinkered advocacy that even Julian Barnes had the startling temerity to declare that Ford made Graham Greene, who rightly called out Last Post as “an afterthought,” look old-fashioned. Seriously bro?

Gentlemen don’t earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter.

Compare this with Greene in The Quiet American and you see a significant difference between dowdy bloviating and taut observational precision:

A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

Christopher Tietjens — intended to reflect the dying gasps of an Edwardian age only now appreciated by husky buzzards pinching tobacco in glum dens boxed by dowdy leatherbound walls — is surely among the least interesting protagonists in 20th century literature. He is the “last Tory” — a clumsy, blunt, physically gargantuan, and very rude statistician incapable of a jocular remark or a jolly jolt in his gait. Ford banged out pages and pages of leaden dialogue from this insufferable mansplainer. And his observations possess all the pleasure of a two hundred pound steel weight being thrown repeatedly into your solar plexus, presumably with some automated Peloton instructor shrieking into your eardrums with the unsettling tenor of an ICE agent preparing to murder someone in broad daylight. “You betray your non-Anglo-Saxon origin by being so vocal…And by your illuminative exaggerations!” “Little nippers like you don’t stop things….Besides, feel the wind!” The ellipses falsely suggest a free associative genius, but only succeeded in reducing me to unintended laughter. (How else was I supposed to soldier through this book? With a stern and self-immolating chin?) Ford actually presages many of these hokey lines with a breezy “Tietjens said:” in the paragraph before just so he can pad out his pages with the unpersuasive momentum of an undergrad trying to hit the 1,000 word minimum on the essay due the next morning.

Tietjens is often outlined as brilliant, but Ford’s descriptive approach is all tell and no show:

The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid of the very old town.

Now even someone with a particularly acute case of ADHD will look to such a sentence and see that it is trying way too hard to sound “literary” when it doesn’t say much of anything at all. What are we supposed to dwell on here? The putter of the prewar Smith Flyer? Well, we don’t actually feel its spurts or its undulations in this sentence. But we do have the sense that the fly here is in “slow pomp,” or on display. Which doesn’t really conjure up a distinct image. Okay. Fine, Ford. You do you. But how does the “winding marsh road” contribute to the imagery? Does it serve in some juxtaposition to the fly? Of course not. The road image is used to get us to “an absurdly picturesque red pyramid” that stands in apparent counterpoint to “the very old town.” But what kind of red pyramid? How is it picturesque? Again, we don’t know. And it’s utterly maddening. Ford never describes this “pyramid” again. This isn’t poetic at all. It’s word salad. Ford delivers elegant variations that aren’t even interesting in the manner by which they fail — such as “an extraordinary Falstaff’s battalion of muddy odd-come shorts.” Ford stitches together random phrases, but he only succeeds in giving us disorienting incongruities that read more like some well-read guy tagging along with you on a drunken night in Vegas, though without the pleasure of slot machine clinks or a comely stranger you accidentally hook up with. (Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!)

And there’s more hapless syntax where that came from, folks! Should I mention the shadow “falling across the bar of light that the sunlight threw in at his open door” or how a fellow named McKechnie “swallowed as men are said to swallow who suffer from hydrophobia”?

By contrast, here is P.G. Wodehouse describing a golf course at the beginning of “A Woman is Only a Woman”:

It is a vantage-point peculiarly fitted to the man of philosophic mind: for from it may be seen that varied, never-ending pageant, which men call Golf, in a number of its aspects. To your right, on the first tee, stand the cheery optimists who are about to make their opening drive, happily conscious that even a topped shot will trickle a measurable distance down the steep hill. Away in the valley, directly in front of you, is the lake hole, where these same optimists will be converted to pessimism by the wet splash of a new ball. At your side is the ninth green, with its sinuous undulations which have so often wrecked the returning traveler in sight of home. And at various points within your line of vision are the third tee, the sixth tee, and the sinister bunkers about the eighth green⁠—none of them lacking in food for the reflective mind.

This is infinitely more enjoyable than Ford — and not just because Wodehouse is almost always a delight to read. Wodehouse maps out the territory and the types to be found in his setting and he somehow turns golfing — which I myself have never enjoyed outside of the brilliantly designed miniature courses that you find all throughout Ocean City, Maryland — into a joyfully absurd reverie for optimistic philosophy. Where Ford is muddled and confused, Wodehouse is clear and specific, complete with phrases like “wet splash of a new ball.” It is the difference between being stuck at a party with a bitter and rambling old man who gave up on finding felicity at least two decades earlier and a giddy eccentric who plans to cut the rug well into old age — or, at least, as long as his legs will two-step.

Ford Madox Ford was all influence and overhyped “talent.” It’s certainly no accident that the great Jean Rhys devoted her ferocious (and far more gifted) energies to savaging this bombastic tyrant in Quartet — revenge from Rhys after a protracted carnal entanglement. You see, there’s an undeniably skeeze quality to Ford both on the page and in his life. While serving as editor of The Transatlantic Review, Ford used his outsize literary influence to serve as a “literary mentor” to young writers (ahem, young women) decades younger than him. He would publish their early stories and exact a boudoir form of remuneration. This was a less enlightened time in which literary men in positions of power could not be held accountable. And these poor women had to endure Ford’s selfish clit-ignorant thrusts while lying back and thinking of publication. After Ford was rightfully spurned by Violet Hunt (she spent eight ghastly years with Ford; Ford, meanwhile, was cheating on his wife), Ford ruthlessly caricatured her not once, but twice — as Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier and, with evermore preposterous misogyny, as the philandering Sylvia Tietjens (Christopher’s wife) in Parade’s End. Sadly, this was what passed for eminence grise among writers in the early 20th century.

It’s safe to say that, like many clueless male authors who preceded him, Ford could not write women especially well. And this extends to Valentine Wannop, the young suffragette who Tietjens falls for. At the beginning of A Man Could Stand Up–, the third book of Parade’s End, Ford not only has Valentine confused about how to use the telephone, but portrays her dreaming of doing nothing more than eating “pomegranates beside an infinite washtub of Recklitt’s blue.” Recklitt’s Blue, for those of you who aren’t familiar with 19th century household items, was a laundry whitener that helped brighten the hues of your clothes. Despite the fact that we are introduced to Valentine as a free-spirited suffragette in the first volume (unsurprisingly, her best moments in the tetralogy), she not only longs to perform domestic duties, but she complains that she is so alone and lives a “nunlike” existence (“And no one had ever wanted to marry her….No one even had ever tried to seduce her.”).

Now anybody even remotely familiar with the suffragettes knows that they were hardly reticent when it came to passion and sex, either with the men who dated them, with each other, or, quite frequently, as they learned to “control their passions” through the power of theoretical abstinence. (You’d honestly be better off hearing about the suffragettes from Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women than from Ford Madox Ford the chronic mansplainer.) But in reading Parade’s End, we don’t get any real sense of the richer life that Ford was perhaps too incurious or incompetent to draw from. James Longenbach has observed that Ford “took pleasure in feeling more qualified to diagnose the problems with women than women themselves.” (And for anyone who wants to do a deep dive, Reconstructionary Tales, a blog run by Paul Skinner, has a great overview of Ford’s conflicted feelings about the suffragettes.)

My eyes winced with incredulity as Tietjens berated Valentine Wannop for being slightly inaccurate quoting a passage. My soul plummeted into a protective crouch as I realized that Tietjens’s knowledge of the world was largely gleaned from memorizing passages in books with lifeless exactitude and even by reading the encyclopedia in alphabetical order. Almost every time a man showed up in a scene dominated by women, he would flap his lips and I felt very much like Fiona Apple trapped in a bar with the coked out and garrulous egotist Quentin Tarantino.

And here’s the thing. Valentine sees very clearly what a fool Tietjens is:

She knew that his poor mind was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said she was of great help to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory conclusions — of quite startling and attractive theories — with extreme rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her whenever — though it wasn’t now very often — she had an article to write for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing.

Since I’ve been lambasting the man at length, I’ll give Ford a few modest props for this more clear-eyed passage, but this still circles back to one of my primary gripes about Parade’s End. Obviously, Ford possessed enough cognizance to understand how “modern” women of that era were juggling love and career. But Ford, like many mediocre men before him, is largely incurious about the latter and vitiates what talent he possessed by saturating himself in the former. Hell, even Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa — a massive masterpiece that happily occupied weeks of my reading time last year — showed far more curiosity about the inner life of a young woman than Ford did in Parade’s End. And that’s also accounting for the 18th century’s comparatively more atavistic genuflection to the patriarchy.

Furthermore, activists are fiercely loyal to their causes, particularly if they protest (as Valentine does) on a daily basis. Near the end of Some Do Not…, there is a lengthy section in which Valentine agrees to become Tietjens’s “mistress” — although nothing is consummated — and we are beholden to what is arguably the most pathetic male fantasy on the Modern Library list: namely, Valentine’s fawning admiration for the “poor mind” of this hopeless dullard.

* * *

The first of the Parade’s End books was published two years after Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a year before Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and while Proust was five books into In Search of Lost Time. These modernist geniuses served up poetic passages about consciousness. They used abstract prose in thrilling and experimental ways to unpack the crags and nuances of human existence. Ford, by contrast, has merely given us clunky prose in which the reader is randomly deposited into a new time and location. Upon solving any “riddle” that Ford presents us, the answer itself proves to be disappointingly pedestrian. It really doesn’t help that Ford is fond of having his characters repeat the title of his novel. “No more parades” obviously means that the pomp and circumstance of established social routines derived from the old social order aren’t exactly going to be practiced after machine guns, mustard gas, and trench warfare demonstrated the truly monstrous possibilities of humankind. And the Groby Great Tree cut down at Tietjens’s estate is more of a blunt and obvious metaphor of the old order collapsing rather than anything especially profound. Ford then commits the grave sin of not only believing himself to be much more clever than he really is, but in giving us a clunky journey in which we increasingly do not care about the destination.

Those who have praised Ford have done so on the basis of what I would deem “consciousness presented through continuous partial attention.” Yet they hold their tongues at the extremely contrived setups throughout the work. Mr. Duchemin, for example, goes insane without any specific reason. There is one particularly awful scene in Some Do Not… in which the “brilliant” Tietjens dukes it out with a banker over a series of overdraft charges.

Oh, but all the confusion and contradiction! The stuff of true literature! It’s why Parade’s End is on this list! Well, I see these more as significant liabilities rather than virtues. I simply cannot believe that Parade’s End was carefully designed as an invaluable modernist contribution — in large part because Ford, at times, doesn’t seem to know Tietjens. We learn, for example, that Christopher has two brothers (one that appears on page) in Some Do Not…. By the time we get to No More Parades, Christopher conveniently has a sister, who has previously been unmentioned. If this is the “inner life” meant to hammer home the conflict between the old and the new social orders, then I’d rather soak in a season of Bridgerton. But, hey, at least I’m now free of this dreadful opus. Don’t worry. I’m quite fond of the next few titles and I’ll behave myself slightly better in future installments!

Next Up! Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon!

by Edward Champion

The Age of Innocence (Modern Library #58)

Edith Wharton’s classic novel is a more somber and often breathtaking warning about the dangers of conforming with the upper crust. But the reading experience is not made easy by Newland Archer, the dudebro of his time, being Wharton’s most insufferable protagonist.

(This is the forty-third entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Zuleika Dobson.)

Newland Archer — the “hero” of Edith Wharton’s most celebrated novel (and the first book written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize) — is the 1870s answer to some privileged techbro half-heartedly trading crypto out of some Sand Hill Road office rental split with an AI slop merchant, leaving the finer details of regular cash flow to a hungrier underling living paycheck to paycheck. Yes, he’s a lawyer, although we never see him drafting a brief or appearing in court. (He does review “unwelcome documents,” the Mingotts ask him to persuade Ellen Olenska to talk her out of a divorce, and there is an off-stage lawsuit mentioned near the end of the book, but that’s about it.)

He has everything and more. If you ran into him today, he’d probably be bragging about his kitchen renovation or his Duolingo streak. Fortunately, he is confined to the atmospheric pages of Wharton’s novel, where we witness Newland attending friendly parties at Highbank and living in that dreaded conformist manner that even Emerson associated with the living dead in “Self-Reliance.” He has boxes containing the newest books. Yet all this privilege is just not enough for this foppish and artless staple slacking in nigh high society just before Gotham became the center of the universe. Oh sure, he’s got a fetching fiancée named May Welland who is nearly as vapid as he is (until she comes touchingly alive with an act of genuinely moving generosity during one particularly poignant moment halfway through the book, which naturally made me abhor Newland more). May has a cousin named Countess Ellen Olenska, a hot piece of ass who stirs Newland’s languorous Johnson into an upward bolt by way of her putative cosmopolitan experience. Thus, in The Age of Innocence, it’s hello Ellen, goodbye May, without the decency of Roger Hodgson’s high tenor singing “Will we ever meet again?” over cheerful keyboards in A♭ Major.

You may be thinking that I hated the book. But that’s not true. Wharton’s prose and storytelling craft in Age is as delicately crafted as any of the other high watermarks of her awe-inspiring career, frequently saddled with that understated sardonic quality of hers that I love so much. She notes that a woman’s hair “had tried to turn white and only succeeded in fading.” Her description of Ned Winsett also crackles when she notes how he “moved his arms with large pawing gestures, as though he were distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude.” And even though Wharton notes, during a hubba hubba moment, how Newland and Ellen’s “vain terrors [shriveled] up like ghosts at sunrise,” a brilliantly evocative image conjuring those last chance pangs that feel more immediate with oxytocin hits, I don’t buy for a second that Newland truly loves or cares about anyone.

In case I haven’t been subtle enough, it’s Newland Archer I hate. It’s a hell of a thing to hang a subtle evisceration of hoary societal virtues on such a cipher. I’m fine with reading books about unlikable characters, but it’s another thing when they are uninteresting. Sure, Wharton walks the walk in executing a narrative momentum despite such an unremarkable upper-crust zero at the cynosure. But I’m not going to lie. Newland Archer such a subtly obnoxious prick on the page that I would happily orchestrate one of the bloodiest ass-beatings known to humankind if I had the power to enter classic works of literature like the characters in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Newland is, essentially, the mediocre man of his time and his infuriating entitlement is captured agonizingly well by Wharton:

…there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.

Marriage, for Newland, is little more than a medium with which to pass a substantial chunk of years. Early on in the novel, when Countess Olenska responds to one of his messages, he is smitten by the first three words “I ran away.” Like most young men who refuse to understand that moving to a new city or taking up a new job aren’t going to rid you of your preexisting problems, Newland is intoxicated by amorphous flight. And instead of asking Olenska what in the sam hill she means by “running away,” he instead imagines “some dark menace from abroad.” Newland’s limited imagination seems to be the very impetus that kickstarts his patriarchal desire to dominate her.

Newland’s indolence and his First World problems are probably the primary reason why I’m not as hot on this Wharton volume as I’d like to be. At least with “New Year’s Day” (contained in Old New York), Wharton demonstrated great craft on the affair between Henry Prest and Mrs. Lizzie Hazeldean, revealing how society’s understanding of this ostensible series of horizontal hookups did not quite live up to the reality. But there is no such disparity with Newland Archer. Newland is exactly who he appears to be: a chin-scratching slab of meat with an ADHD approach to women and a lack of curiosity matching some lonely mansplainer complaining about the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” when the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t know how to shut up and listen to women. All that spare time and no ambition to guide it. Excuse me while I bust out the world’s smallest violin.

Wharton’s best biographer, Hermione Lee, has astutely observed that The Age of Innocence, of all of Wharton’s books, represented the widest gap between the time Wharton was writing (a remarkably swift six months ending in March 1920) and the time she was writing about (1871-1873), although I don’t fully buy her thesis that Innocence represented an autobiography. For one thing, Innocence is far more muted and guarded (but also more exquisitely understated) than The House of Mirth, which takes place a good two decades later. (With greater permissiveness allowed by later folkways, the characters will obviously dance to a slightly more liberated groove.)

At times, this remote detachment makes Innocence feel more like a work of history than fiction — even more so than Wharton’s Old New York novellas, which all contain far more zest than they get credit for. Age has a more subdued approach than the exuberance on display in Mirth. Lee rightly notes that Wharton had this tendency to leap away every time the characters revealed anything intimate, which suggests that the unpredictable vagaries of human agency are at odds with the fixed nature of history. So it should probably come as no surprise that a blunt and irreverent type like me was more passionate about Mirth than Age and that Wharton’s detached legerdemain proved a little too similar to the mannered logorrhea of her good friend Henry James — a writer whom I largely despise and whose novels I am sadly fated to write about. (Join the fun of watching a bald man lose his mind when we get to ML32, ML27, and ML26!) Still, I cannot gainsay Wharton’s great achievement here.

This is the New York of the 1870s: the onset of the Gilded Age and the tail end of Tweed. It is a little over two decades before the five boroughs consolidated, marching with mad passionate unity to forge a motile metropolis in which iron stalagmites sprouted into the sky with feverish chaotic glee. It is three decades before the sleek beatific curves of City Hall Station inaugurated a new subterranean mode of travel and Wharton’s great heroine Lily Bart lost it all. We are reminded all throughout Age that New York, despite its impressive development, is still something a runt on the world stage. But it is a metropolis blissfully unaware (truly innocent?) of the corruption and grift that will eventually define it. As Wharton writes with muted irony, “New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay.”

Yet even at this premodern nascent point, Gotham’s class aspirations feel preordained. Newland remarks that The Shaughraun, a wildly popular melodramatic play of that pre-Broadway epoch, is as good as anything in Paris or London. Much later in the book, when Newland does find himself in London on his honeymoon, he cluelessly asks, “But don’t Englishwomen dress like everybody else in the evening?” Wharton also reminds us near the end of the novel that this is also the New York before the North River Tunnels carried trains to Penn Station (and one vital takeaway is that Newland doesn’t want these tunnels to be built):

there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.

When Newland considers one of Madame Olenska, he observes that “the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.” Could this not likewise be the beginning of the New York temperament?

Of course, you can’t gainsay The Age of Innocence‘s prose style. Some of the snarky imagery in the juicier Wharton novels does bubble up in Age from time to time, such as May Welland’s face wearing “the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.” And Wharton’s glorious eclat for punchy noun-modifier rhythm is admirably fierce when she describes May “looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes.”

It’s a pity then that Newland Archer is far flatter than the women, especially since Newland is the dude we have to spend time with while reading this. I get what Wharton was trying to do in sending up society with a doe-eyed meatbag of no great distinction as the protagonist. Stanley Kubrick’s best film, Barry Lyndon, succeeds in part because of the juxtaposition of Michael Hordern’s wry narration against the bland opportunism of Ryan O’Neal playing the titular character. (I suspect that Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Age was trying to recapture Kubrick’s stylistic approach to period-piece social critique with Joanne Woodward’s narration.) But after a certain point, shouldn’t exhuming the past like this offer a corresponding set of virtues? A nimble evisceration of the upper crust needs to have a few characters who remind us why life is worth living. And Age, despite numerous mesmerizing passages, will never hit me in the way that The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country do. Even Pride and Prejudice, for all of its brilliant lunges at snobbery and reputation, still reminds us that marriage, if one is to do it, should be taken seriously and be predicated upon mutual respect rather than whether or not you meet the right people who can get you courtside seats for a Knicks game. And I feel that this is Age‘s fatal flaw. The emotional distance that Wharton demands of us deadens the journey.

On the other hand, the manner in which Newland and Madame Olenska gradually transform into “exhibits” of their time as the book leisurely moves to its end is legitimately brilliant. At one point, the adulterous couple visits the Wolfe collection at the Met and Newland remarks, “Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.” Shortly after that, May remarks on exhibits that don’t matter being put under a label reading “Use unknown.” Newland’s confidence in the future becomes sad and absurd and his fate is sealed in the novel’s haunting final moments:

It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked forward—the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been limited—even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall

It is a stern warning about the dangers of neutering your existence while conforming to patrician dipsticks. Sometimes being true to yourself, rather than avoiding “anything melodramatic and conspicuous” to fit in, is the very life choice you must make to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Next Up: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End!

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

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-eighth 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!)

by Edward Champion

The Catcher in the Rye (Modern Library #64)

As a teenager, I loved Salinger’s classic. But I can’t get behind it as a middle-aged man. I don’t hate Salinger. What is it about Holden Caulfield that rubs me the wrong way?

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

Like many semi-literate members of my generation, I first read The Catcher in the Rye at the age of fifteen, following the ethereal rites and cadences of older kids turned on by the same seductive anthem to nonconformity. At that angsty teenage time in my life, Holden Caulfield appealed to my rebellious and anti-authoritarian streak. This reaction, in and of itself, is not especially unusual. Salinger has continued to be assigned to high school English curricula in large part because you can inveigle kids into reading by making the titles forbidden. (Witness how Art Spiegelman’s Maus became a surprise bestseller last year after some boneheaded martinets banned the evocative Holocaust graphic novel from Tenneessee school libraries.)

I am now in my late forties and I still remain as iconoclastic and as boundary-pushing (though a tad less loutish) as I was when I was a mere stripling, although I’d like to think that my temperament has been made more palatable by my greater commitment to pragmatism. In that intervening time I avoided rereading Catcher until last year, dreading the disagreeable revisitation when this classic at long last emerged on this insanely ambitious project like some former crush at the twenty year high school reunion inviting you to a hotel room after spilling the tatters of her doomed marriage. You instinctively know that you’re better off chatting up some comely and perspicacious stranger at the hotel bar, someone without a loose thread dangling from a varsity sweater in mothballs. Because who you were when you knew nothing is quite different from the middle-aged person you are now who knows slightly more than nothing. There’s enough cognizance in the tank to suggest that a freeform hookup consummated long after your adolescent lust has shriveled up is a very bad idea. Particularly one in which you aid and abet nuptial dissolution by your own selfish spasms.

And while I will stand by most of Salinger’s Nine Stories and, in particular, the far more interesting thoughts of the precocious Glass family (I’m even willing to stump a bit for the problematic “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which is far more interesting in its uncompromising stance than anything gurgling from Holden Caulfield’s mouth), I can no longer hold up The Catcher in the Rye as great literature — not that it was ever really my goto choice. (James Baldwin, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller (yeah, I know) proved far more formative to me in my younger days than Salinger ever could.)

I find Holden Caulfield to be an insufferable and entitled monster, a budding sociopath who can only find joy in snow and his younger sister Phoebe when he’s not breaking windows and getting into dust-ups and treating everyone around him (particularly the poor girls who have the misfortune of dating him) like shit, which could explain in part why John Hinckley, Jr. took to Salinger like a box jellyfish flocking to corral shortly before trying to gun down the Evil Gipper. Upon rereading Catcher last month to take assiduous notes, I was astonished by my hate-read glee and how loudly I cheered during the moment when the pimp/elevator operator Maurice storms into Holden’s room at the Edmont Hotel, trying to collect an additional five dollars from this monied and mottled brat. Given Holden’s precious olfactory sense (even while smoking?) and the way he sneers at everyone around him, the detestable little bastard had it coming.

Holden is not even a proper punk because he cares about nobody other than himself. I felt sorry for the poor taxi drivers who had to contend with Holden’s facile riddle about where the ducks in Central Park go during the winter. His ties to his family only exist as pretexts to defend his braggadocio and his dubious victimhood, which Salinger feels the need to cram down our throats with Holden’s dead brother Allie. His ethos, if it can be called that, revolves around relentless narcissism and feigned sybaritism. What does it say that I found myself wanting to spend more time with Alex in A Clockwork Orange rather than this infernal sixteen-year-old misanthrope with his hideously obnoxious “I really did,” “phony,” “goddamn,” and “crumby” (to say nothing of Salinger’s annoying tendency to italicize the first syllable of a word, a stylistic practice that has fortunately not been picked up by his fiction-writing sycophants). At least Alex was committed to classical music and “the heighth of fashion” (the word “heighth” appears three times in Catcher and one can’t help but ponder how much the novel may have influenced Anthony Burgess) when he wasn’t busy raping and murdering ten-year-olds. What does Holden Caulfield even stand for? His Weltanschauung is little more than a collection of easy shots at obvious targets. My views on Holden Caulfield are quite similar to film critic Glenn Kenny railing against Ferris Bueller. But unlike Kenny, I actually like Ferris Bueller! In fact, I’d argue that the difference between John Hughes and Salinger is that Hughes loved his characters. Whereas Salinger didn’t really find that type of auctorial love until he wrote about the Glass family. (Joyce Maynard informs us that he protected the Glasses like jeweled treasure.) And if David Shields and Shane Salerno’s quirky and engaging Salinger bio is anything to go by, Holden Caulfield represented Salinger himself far more than any of his other characters. (Salinger insisted that he was the only person who could play Holden in any dramatic adaptation.) Given how broken Salinger was after battling in the Hürtgen Forest and witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust death camps, an argument could be made that Catcher represents more of an artistic exercise in self-loathing rather than a free-wheeling celebration of anarchic adolescence.

The way I see it, The Catcher in the Rye is more of a myth than a literary achievement. The vainglorious rush to throw a risibly wide net of influence from Catcher — simply on the basis of the novel selling 65 million copies over the years — is best epitomized by a surprisingly myopic assessment from Louis Menand on the occasion of Catcher‘s fiftieth anniversary. Menand cited Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as “Catcher in the Rye rewrites.” Never mind that — even accounting for his Salingerphilia — Eggers’s book was a memoir mining from lived experience rather than a novel. (Did Eggers deliberately live out his twenties like Caulfield? For all of his ignoble public image management, I greatly doubt it.) In 2010, writing on the occasion of Salinger’s passing, McInerney confessed that he had been “baffled” by the comparisons, pointing out that he not read Salinger for years while working on his debut novel.

Now some of you, knowing how outspoken and take-no-prisoners I can be with my little essays, probably came here for a salacious hit piece. Maybe you’re gleefully steeping your fingers awaiting a knee-jerk drive-by on the long dead Jerome David (or Jerry, as his closest pals called him). But I don’t want to write that. I am just one hardcore reader trying to be honest here. And nothing that I say will diminish Catcher‘s immense popularity. Its stature and its legacy are safely preserved. Additionally, the highfalutin thuggery of clickbait doesn’t interest me. It’s far too easy to write. As it so happens, I actually like Saligner’s writing. In my reread of Salinger’s oeuvre, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Franny” (which anticipates the dangers of toxic masculinity by decades), and “Seymour: An Introduction” spoke to me far more in my middle-aged years than ever before.

No, I’m more interested in interrogating why I despised the novel so much as a grownass man. Where did things go wrong between Holden and me over the last thirty years? I certainly don’t feel this way about such troublemakers as Huck Finn, Ignatius J. Reilly, Bart Simpson, Calvin and Hobbes, Peeves, A Fan’s Notes‘s Fred, Sam Lipsyte’s Lewis Miner, or Denis Johnson’s Fuckhead — many of whom were arguably more plagued than Holden Caulfield. I cannot gainsay that Catcher remains very well-loved (my girlfriend’s teenage daughter speaks highly of it) and that there was a time (sort of) when it spoke to me. If I were a hopelessly moronic and hubris-riddled hack like Dan Kois — who recently learned his lesson the hard way — then I’d probably cleave cheaply to this enmity and arrogantly take my lumps without learning a goddamned thing. The truth of the matter is that I wish I could love Holden Caulfield more. Because much of Salinger’s other work is amazing.

I think it is Salinger the person who I cannot stand. His grooming and victimization of Joyce Maynard, Jean Miller, and many others. His savvy manipulation of New Yorker editor William Shawn (just as private and as isolated as Saligner). The strange contradiction of his reclusiveness and his exhibitionism. Saligner outed people and details when he was alive and wrote letters and unpublished essays to control the narrative (particularly in relation to Tom Wolfe’s notorious hit piece on The New Yorker) rather than allowing the world to pass him by. The gruff meanness to “intruders” and the lack of grace or humility about his success. Small wonder that the likes of Alfred Kazin and John Updike started lobbing rocks at him when it came to the Glass family. Salinger’s biographers will tell you that this was a case of envious competitors using their gatekeeping advantages to keep Jerry in place. But I think it had more to do with the more toxic qualities behind the talent that they innately detected but could not quite pinpoint until Catcher had become a classic. (Even an endearing oddball like Ron Rosenbaum, no stranger to Salinger enthusiasm, confessed that he suffered from “Saligner fatigue,” even as he wrongly impugned anyone (including Shields and Salerno) from reading Catcher as a symbiosis between author and fictional creation.) Kazin rightly points out that Holden Caulfield is “cute” only because we expect boys of his age to be “consciously appealing and consciously clever.” Updike notes how Salinger’s post-Catcher work has the author “never rest[ing] from circling his creations, patting them fondly. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

So if you’re in the “Salinger’s Glass family stories are better” camp like me, you have no problem with an author who was willing to steer the reader a little harder to get to a more Zen-like artistic place. If you’re in the “Catcher is better” camp, I would contend that you are more willing to be captivated by Holden’s “cute” and “loving” charms without considering the problematic scaffolding that props all this up.

But for the Catcher stans, consider how much more pointed and playful Buddy Glass’s nonconformist missives are in “Seymour — An Introduction”:

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped…

And so on. This beautiful rant from Salinger — which rhythmically evokes Goethe’s idea of “the whole, the good, and the beautiful” sans one syllable — is as punk rock as it gets and has greater crags to cling to than any of Holden Caulfield’s cheap and tedious nihilism:

Grand. There’s a word I hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

Or:

God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.

Or:

It isn’t important, I know, but I hate it when somebody has cheap suitcases. It sounds terrible to say it, but I can even get to hate somebody, just looking at them, if they have cheap suitcases with them.

At times, Holden’s complaints about the world read like a very rich and incredibly elitist standup comic who isn’t very funny — someone as detestable as Bill Maher.

We know that Salinger worked very hard on Catcher, impressively writing the bones of Catcher in the World War II battlefields, sending these early stories off to New York (some getting published), and, years later, holing up in the New Yorker office and other hermetic Manhattan foxholes for a year to polish and perfect Catcher. Catcher can certainly be commended as the work of an artist baring himself completely in ways that — much like Kerouac — were unprecedented at the time, only for Salinger to bury all these truths behind ambiguities that feel a little too on-the-nose, such as Mr. Antolini patting Holden on the head (awkward drunken tenderness or molestation?). But it’s also a study in a tormented man running away from his demons (i.e., Holden refusing to grow up) rather than confronting them head-on such as he did so well with the trauma of World War II veterans in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

And that, to my mind, is the great tragedy of Salinger. Here was this master of the short story and the novella who wanted to grow beyond what he was best known for and become an even greater artist. But he was curtailed from publishing anything beyond “Hapford” by a reproachful and imperious literati who ultimately wanted more of the same. He beguiled readers with a beatific looking glass that, upon closer study, reveals more than a few fissures. And when he tried to reinvent himself, it was much too late.

Next Up: John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle!