Patricia Lockwood, _Priestdaddy: A Memoir_

 LOCKWOOD IS ANOTHER poet who seems to be devoting more time to prose lately. I hope she is not done with poetry, but I do enjoy her prose. Her piece on Elena Ferrante earlier this year in LRB was delightful.

The most powerful chapter in this memoir, as it happens, reads like a prose poem: “Voice,” mainly about Lockwood, as a teenager, struggling with trying to sing and incidentally struggling with much else and eventually attempting suicide. Like her best known poem, “Rape Joke,” it translates trauma into the driest imaginable standup routine, a certain deadpan affect combined with starkly lit clarity.

The book is only occasionally about Lockwood’s childhood and youth, however. Mainly, it narrates a period of roughly a year during which Lockwood and her husband, their finances capsized by medical expenses, live with her parents. A tricky situation in any circumstances, but Lockwood’s father boosts the ante. 

He’s a Roman Catholic priest, for one thing—the Roman Catholic church famously does not let its priests marry, but married men may become priests and continue to live with their families. He holds militantly right wing opinions about homosexuality and guns, often SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, likes to lounge around the house in his underwear, and likes to play electric guitar...loudly. Not exactly Going My Way, in other words.

Lockwood recalls watching a video of The Exorcist with her sister as a child and being scared to death. An opportunity for parental soothing and reassurance, in a lot of households—“honey, it’s just a movie”—but Father Lockwood assures his daughter that everything in the movie is based on actual fact and furthermore it all happened right in St. Louis, the town where they were then living.

I was grateful not to have to live with Father Lockwood, but he was unfailingly entertaining to read about—grotesque but compelling, like certain Flannery O’Connor characters or Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. The book is often screamingly funny (see the list on 146-47, “I Guess the Plots of My Father’s Favorite Movies Based on the Sounds Coming through the Walls”). It’s surprisingly tender at times, without ever getting soft. Could become a classic.

Alexander Chee, _How to Write an Autobiographical Novel_

 LAST SUMMER I read and learned from Chee’s essay “How to Unlearn Everything,” so when a friend mentioned he was reading and enjoying this, I decided to give it a try.

It’s brilliant—a collection of personal essays, mainly about the writing life. Other topics come up (family, Chee’s time as an AIDS activist, gardening, tarot, William F. Buckley [!]), but writing is the ground tone.

 Chee writes of taking a class with Annie Dillard, of badmouthing the Iowa Writers Workshop but deciding to go anyway, of the mazy paths between having an experience and writing fiction about that experience. The title essay could be a valuable corrective for anyone who thinks that writing an autobiographical novel is mainly a matter of recalling what happened to you and writing it down.

Also enlightening are “The Autobiography of My Novel” and “100 Things about Writing a Novel,” but “The Guardians” turns out to be the most revealing about the demands of autobiographical fiction.

My favorite essay, though, might have been “The Rosary,” about growing roses...but I’m not sure that wasn’t actually about writing as well.

Traces of Wyndham Lewis Still Aloft on the Cultural Breezes

 LONGTIME READERS OF this blog know that I am peculiarly besotted with the work of British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), friend and associate of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and (for a time) James Joyce, wielder of one of the 20th century’s most distinctive and bristling prose styles. 

Lewis’s politics were so rebarbative— even D. H. Lawrence comes across as woke next to Lewis—that he will likely never enjoy much of a readership. In my lonely enthusiasm, I relish the few occasions when signs appear that Lewis is still read and valued. And just this summer I came across a couple.

The third of the six parts of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, covering the years 1968 to 1975, bears the title “The Moronic Inferno”—a phrase from Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled (1926), an examination of politics and culture. Since the phrase was picked up by Saul Bellow and Martin Amis, Bailey’s use of it does not necessarily signal familiarity with Lewis...but still, I was tickled to see it.

I am also (and much more slowly) working my way through Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology. Jameson published a valuable book on Lewis back in 1979, Fables of Aggression, so I already knew he was a reader of Lewis, but even so it was gratifying to come across this on p. 81:

For a more dispassionate observer (for whom philosophies, as indispensable as they are in articulating new feelings to a historically world, are still essentially symptoms), the new philosophy reflects the coming of what Wyndham Lewis used to call “the human age,” that is, the obliteration of a former nature by man-made objects of all kinds (very much including the information technology which constitutes a dialectically new stage in this humanization).

I am not at all confident I wholly understand this sentence—I’m not sure what the phrase “historically world” means, and I suspect that the “which” ought to be a “that”—but I am happy that Jameson is doing a little to keep the Lewisian flame flickering.

 

Corinne Manning, _We Had No Rules_

 ELEVEN SHORT STORIES, all about queer characters—mostly women but some men, mostly under 40 but some older—set generally in the American present.  

All eleven were well written. I found myself wondering, though, whether they were not a bit too much alike. All are written in the first person, for instance, with the exposition, conflicts, and revelations falling into place in straightforward fashion, and the narrators all adopting the same natural-sounding, educated middle class voice. Despite the volume’s title, the stories are, narratologically speaking, quite well-behaved. 

The possible exception is “Gay Tale,” which has some metafictional moments. As metafiction goes, though, it is relatively mild and digestible.

So, I’m wondering...the stories are about what we could broadly call a revolutionary situation, a USA in which the landscape for out LGBTQ+ people is continually transforming, moving almost daily into new, unexplored territory, navigating the unknown, creating a new world as they go.

Should stories about a revolutionary reality be revolutionary in form?

About 85% of me thinks, “yes, of course,” but 15% of me thinks, well, maybe not...after all, it’s important that this emerging reality be represented in art, and perhaps that art should be of a traditionally realistic (and so relatively accessible) mode, should be more like a document, not an in-your-face aesthetic experiment.

But that other 85% responds, no! What about Dada, Gertrude Stein, Mayakovsky, Artaud? Wojnarowicz, Myles, Gluck?

It all goes back to the Brecht-Lukacs debate, I guess...basically unresolvable.

Ironically, I am writing this with the Dodgers game on in the background, and they just announced that “Pride Night” is coming up at Dodger Stadium, a special event for LGBTQ+ Dodger fans. Maybe the revolution has already occurred, and New Yorker suburban realism is exactly what the moment calls for? I just don’t know.

Toni Morrison, _Sula_

 AS OF MARCH, this was one of the Morrison novels I had not yet read (for the record, the others are Tar Baby, A Mercy, and God Help the Child). I had certainly intended  to read it--I had owned  it for years--but you know how it goes. In April, though, I was scheduled to teach an OLLI adult class on Beloved, so it was time for a Morrison booster--which was exactly what this was.

I was not prepared for the rocket ride this novel is. The Morrison novels I had read most recently--Paradise, Love, Home--were worthwhile, and Paradise I think among her best, but they did sometimes seem weighed down by their own gravitas. Wise, but solemn. Earthbound.

Sula is quick, violent, funny, colorful, irreverent, fantastical, voracious. And wise. But it soars like a hawk, dives like a hawk, strikes home like a hawk.

We have two main characters, Sula and Nel, childhood friends who become estranged, later to reconcile during Sula's final illness. We also find out a lot about their families, their communities, and Black life in the USA between the wars. 

Really, though, it's all in the voice.

Accompanied by a plague of robins, Sula came back to Medallion. The little yam-breasted shuddering birds were everywhere, exciting small children away from their usual welcome into a vicious stoning. Nobody knew why or from where they had come. What they did know was that you couldn't go anywhere without stepping in their pearly shit, and it was hard to hang up clothes, pull weeds or just sit on the front porch when robins were flying and dying all around you.

Niall Williams, _This Is Happiness_

 NOEL CROWE, known to friends and family as “Noe,” narrates this novel. He is in his late seventies, but he is telling a story from when he was seventeen or eighteen, living with his grandparents in the tiny village of Faha in County Clare, having dropped out of seminary after his first year, no longer sure of his vocation.

Noe entered the seminary because of a promise he made his mother as she was dying...but the story is not about him, really. We do not find out what crisis or erosion of faith occurred that prompted him to leave the seminary, for instance. It is 1958, and electrification is coming to Faha. Faha is about to leave the perpetual chill and perpetual damp of rural western Ireland behind and enter the twentieth century and all the ambiguities of progress. But the novel is not really about that, either, exactly. 

The national powers that be have sent to Faha an agent, one Christy McMahon, to oversee the raising of poles and wires and confirm the cooperation of the Fahaeans. Christy is in his late sixties, a capable and likable man. Christy lodges with Noe’s grandparents and Noe, whom he hires as an assistant. They spend their days preparing for electricity’s advent in Faha and their nights scouting in the region’s pubs hoping to find the legendary fiddler, Junior Crehan.

But the novel is not exactly about that, either, for it turns out that Christy has arranged to have himself sent to Faha mainly because he learns that Annie Mooney lives there—the woman known to Faha as Mrs. Gaffney, the chemist’s widow. Christy left Annie at the altar fifty years ago. He now seeks forgiveness.

That is what the novel is about, I think, but it is really about all of the developments described above and a few more into the bargain—how poles are to be acquired from Finland and how rural telephone operators became disseminators of information, as well as how Noe came to fall in unrequited love with all three of the local doctor’s beautiful daughters and discovered a facility with the fiddle. He never does get back to the seminary.

What the novel may really be about is the peculiar power of the vanished—how that which is gone might remain with us, like music, somehow subtly shaping our being even after it is gone.

Jamie Metzl, _Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity_

 "IN THE YEAR 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by (Denny) Zager and (Rick) Evans was a transatlantic #1 back when I was in high school. It included the verse:

In the year 6565

Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife

You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too

From the bottom of a long glass tube, whoa-whoa.

Little did I know back in 1969 that twenty years later I would join the English Department at the very college where Zager met Evans...anyway, thanks to their song and a boatload of similar sci-fi songs, fictions, films, etc., I did get the impression that humans would soon figure out how to engineer themselves. That humans would eventually all be lab-engineered was part of, for example, Aldous Huxley's dystopia fiction Brave New World, published in 1932, which I read about the same time Zager and Evans were zooming up the charts .

I thought of Huxley, Zager & Evans, and a host of others while reading Metzl's book because I was trying to figure out why nothing about it seemed surprising. Zager and Evans were way off as to date--tube-conceived sons and daughters are already an established part of the landscape--but relatively on-target as to outcome. As an occasional reader of science fiction, the whole of Metzl's book had a déja lu feel for me.

Metzl certainly has a point that we need to make some decisions right now about what the ethics and legality of these new developments ought to look like. I was glad to hear that he had been named to some commission or other, because he seems to know his onions about this topic. But I could not shake the feeling that this was all old news.

James Shapiro, _Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Pst and Future_

 CRIKEY, HAVE I really not posted on this blog since February? One of those semesters.

Shapiro’s book makes a good companion to Tyrant, Stephen Greenblatt’s short book on how Shakespeare had Trump’s number back four-hundred-and-something years ago.  Shakespeare in a Divided America does not duplicate Greenblatt’s effort, though. Like Greenblatt’s book, Shapiro’s book is compact (just over 200 pages), smart, and devoted to Shakespeare’s relevance to our national politics; unlike Greenblatt’s, it is about the past more than the present (although it does discuss the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar bore a marked resemblance to the Orange One).

Shapiro devotes a chapter apiece to eight episodes of national contention that found expression in the Shakespearean productions of the time, starting before the Civil War (e.g., “1833: Miscegenation,” “1845: Manifest Destiny”) and ending up in the present (“1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love,” “2017: Left/Right”). I knew, vaguely, that Shakespeare has been a staple of American theater for as long as there has been one, but I did not know that relying on his cultural clout to make statements about Issues of Moment goes all the way back as well. Performers and producers used Othello to make points about people of African descent, The Tempest to make points about immigration, Taming of the Shrew to make points about marriage—often extremely retrograde points, with talk about Shakespeare’s Understanding of Eternal Human Verities as smokesceen.

Great idea for a book, but what puts the project over the top is Shapiro’s none-better skills in working an archive (see his 1599). His chapter on the Booths, for instance, is by itself worth picking up the book for. (I did not know that John Wilkes Booth was much admired for his performance as Brutus.)

I very much appreciated that Shapiro, while skillfully describing how Shakespeare has been used as a front for culturally conservative campaigns, also shows how the plays present numerous opportunities for directors who want to take them a different way. Like Whitman (and Dylan), Shakespeare contains multitudes.