Nick Drnaso, _Acting Class_

 HAPPY HALLOWE’EN! IF you are seeking something disturbing, you might try this.

Ten people—some of whom are related to or acquainted with each other, but who are for the most part strangers—all sign up for a free acting class at a local community center. All ten are at or nearing an impasse of some sort: an overwhelmed single mother, a grandmother looking after a granddaughter whose mental health is precarious, a couple whose marriage is failing, people in dead-end jobs. Everyone is a bit needy, a bit vulnerable, and each is looking for something different, some sort of jump start into a better or more fulfilling or at least more interesting life.

The class’s teacher, John, leads them into ever more elaborate improv scenarios, some of which involve new locations and turn out to last longer than expected, some of which take on an eerie feel, as though they were a group hallucination, or drug trip, or even as though they were being led to the threshold of some portal to a different reality. The neediest and most vulnerable, as it happens, are given the most powerful; fantasies (if that is what they are) and buy in the most deeply.

Four of the ten opt out, leave the class, but six opt in and board a van for…what? A new life in a new town? A cult? John tells one of the opters-out that he is “just a recruiter.” But for what? Something he calls “the real work.” Are the four missing out of some unutterable transformation? Or have they narrowly escaped some terrible exploitation? We don’t know.

Disturbing. But memorable.

Drnaso’s style in this book aligns closely with that of his last, Sabrina. A color palette that leans heavily on brown, gray, and beige; rectilinear, almost featureless interiors; characters whose eyes, noses, and mouths look a lot like each other’s, leaving the shape and color of their hair as the main clue to their identity. The style is spookily fitting for the story, actuality mapping without much difference onto dream, and good dreams not quickly distinguishable from nightmares.

Matthew Zapruder (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _The Best American Poetry 2022_

 I FAILED AGAIN in my annual quest to read one year's BAmPo before the next year's was published; the 2023 volume appeared in September, and I was only a few pages into this one.

What is up with that, by the way? How can this be the best American poetry of 2022 if it appeared when there were still four months left of 2022? Strictly speaking, this should be called 75 Excellent American Poems from the Last Half of 2021 and the First Half of 2022. Awkward, I know, but more accurate.

The poetry is this volume is right down the middle of the plate, we might say, not unlike Mr. Zapruder's own work: leaning heavily towards personal anecdote, language generally plain with lyrical flashes, occasional shadows cast by events in the wider world (the lockdown, the wildfires in California, Black Lives Matter).

I noted with interest that the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day site is well-represented--eight poems, more I think than any other single source.

The individual poems I think I will remember longest are Diane Seuss's "Modern Poetry" (about college classes she took on that subject--judging from the reading list, Seuss and I must be near exact contemporaries) and Michael Robins's "The Remaining Facts," about his wife's sudden death while she was on an out-of-town trip, an event the poem never directly mentions.

Cookie Mueller, _Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories_

 I LEARNED OF this through a very positive review in the LRB a while back. Cookie Mueller was, among other things, an actress; she appeared in several John Waters films. She also wrote strikingly non-judgmental advice column in the East Village Eye and a column for Details magazine.

This volume collects some of the columns and a few short stories, but for the most part it is autobiographical essays about Mueller's life and adventures growing up in Baltimore, making the scene in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, working with John Waters, and making the scene in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She died in 1989 at age 40, of "AIDS-related complications," according to the "about the author" note.

Mueller seems to have lived fairly impulsively, in regards to travel, work, sex, pharmaceuticals, and so on--the sort of person who "always took candy from strangers," as Keith Richards put it in "Happy." The stories consequently reflect some very dicey situations ("Narcotics," "Abduction and Rape--Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland, 1969"), but even though the whole book is a walk on the wild side, Mueller maintains a witty, matter-of-fact tone and wry humor, as when her efforts to revive a friend who has overdosed in a bathroom are constantly interrupted by a partygoer outside the door who keeps demanding he be allowed in to urinate ("Sam's Party--Lower East Side, 1979"). The revived person then complains that his friends did not remove his sharkskin suit before they dunked him in a tub of cold water. 

The literature of transgression is vast, but we might draw a line between that written by people who write about it freshly, memorably, and vividly (Genet, say) and those whose experiences are outrageous but whose sentences are pedestrian. Mueller could really write.

"I lived there with my pet monkey who liked cockroaches. He used to scan the fabric walls for them. When he saw one from all the way across the room with his primate super X-ray vision, he'd swing the distance on the ceiling pipes and deftly scoop up the bug with one hand, pop it in his mouth, and swing back to the curtain rod window perch where he lived. He was a good pet."

Robert Southey, _Joan of Arc_

 A GREAT FRIEND of Wordsworth and Coleridge, among other literary figures, and Poet Laureate of Great Britain in the latter part of his career, Southey wrote this epic poem in six weeks when he was twenty. It was published a couple of years later, in 1796. De Quincey recommended regarding Joan of Arc as juvenilia, a remark which seemed to me a rude dismissal, but now that I have read part of the poem (the beginning and the end, basically), I would call it charitable, in that it suggests Southey went on to do much better things.

 Joan of Arc is cringe-inducing. Right out of the gate, Southey takes considerable liberties with Joan's history. He begins with Joan encountering Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, on her way to Charles VII's court at Chinon (didn't happen). They exchange stories; Joan tells Dunois that though she was born in Domrémy, she was raised in Harfleur (not true) and that her father was fatally injured in Henry V of England's taking of that city (nope). Joan was subsequently raised by hermit in the woods, who happens to be a herbalist healer (WTF?). 

I looked ahead to learn that the poem ends with the Battle of Patay (at which Joan was actually not present) and the coronation of Charles. That is, Joan's capture, trial, and martyrdom--for me, the most heroic part of her story--are left out of Southey's poem.

On top of that, the writing is clunky and wheezing, sub-sub-Milton.

At length I heard of Orleans, by the foe
Wall'd in from human succour; to the event
All look'd with fear, for there the fate of France
Hung in the balance.

However...the first half of Book II was written mostly by Coleridge, and it is fascinating. Coleridge is (I think) trying to answer the question of where Joan's voices came from, and he works around, in his Unitarian/pantheist/metaphysics-drenched Coleridgean way,  to the idea that they came from Being itself, which he does not shy away from explaining :

          Others boldlier think
That as one body is the aggregate 
Of atoms numberless, each organiz'd
So by a strange and dim similitude, 
Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds
Form one all-conscious spirit, who directs
With absolute ubiquity of thought
All  his competent monads, that yet seem
with various province and apt agency
Each to pursue its self-centering end.       

Thus my man Sam.  This was the spirit Joan heard. Coleridge wraps up his contribution with a stirring and utterly idiosyncratic hymn of praise:

 "Glory to thee, FATHER of Earth and Heaven!
All conscious PRESENCE of the Universe!
Nature's vast ever-acting ENERGY!
In will, in deed, IMPULSE of All to all,
Whether thy LAW with unrefracted Ray
Beam on the PROPHET'S purged Eye, or if
Distressing Realms the ENTHUSIAST wild of thought
Scatter new frenzies of the infected Throng,
THOU Both inspiring, and predooming Both,
Fit INSTRUMENTS and best of perfect END.
Glory to thee, Father of Earth and Heaven!"

Whew! Unfortunately, Southey decided to remove all of Coleridge's contribution to Book II when Joan of Arc was republished in 1798. I don't know why--perhaps he decided it did not match the rest of the poem (it doesn't, being much more interesting) or perhaps the friendship was on the rocks. Coleridge had ill-advisedly married the sister of Southey's wife, and the marriage did not go well. Hats off to editor Lynda Pratt for including both the 1796 and the 1798 texts in this handy first volume of Southey's Poetical Works, published by Pickering and Chatto in 2004.

                                                                                    

Romain Rolland, _Péguy_

 HAVING NOW READ Charles Péguy's fascinating but highly idiosyncratic play Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc, I have been looking for help in understanding what Péguy may have been up to, and found this two-volume study by another important French writer not much talked about in the USA, Romain Rolland. 

I've just been looking at Rolland's Wikipedia entry. I knew he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1915) and that his chief work was a roman-fleuve in ten books titled Jean-Christophe (about a Beethoven-inspired German composer, but set in the early 20th century), but I had not read a word of him, nor did I know that he was a highly active in politics as he was--a defender of Stalin right through the 1930s, for instance, and a very vocal anti-fascist. But he also corresponded with Freud and with Richard Strauss, and had a part in expanding the renown of Swami Vivekananda. Interesting person. 

Péguy was published in 1944, thirty years after its subject's death, and in the year of Rolland's own death. (I haven't found out where Rolland was during the war...Switzerland, perhaps? Hard to imagine him being welcome in Vichy France.) It's a biography, in a way, but also in a way a memoir, since Rolland was a long time friend and associate of Péguy, and also to some extent a critical analysis of Péguy's chief works, and also a bit of a contextualizing of that work within the intellectual climate of France in the early 20th century.

I have not read (and probably will not read) the whole thing, but the discussion of Mystère de la Charité was substantial, about twenty pages, and worthwhile. I don't know how orthodox Rolland's reading his, but he sees Jeanne as an embodiment of authentic Christianity debating and winning a debate with the Church, as embodied by Mme. Gervaise. Christianity is true, is real, but its chief steward, the Roman Catholic Church, has been remiss, half-hearted, compromised...and has been so from the very beginning, as one of Jeanne's chief points is that Peter and the other disciples' abandonment of Jesus during his trial was cowardly and inexcusable.

Jeanne is sure that she would not have abandoned Jesus--"Moi, je suis sûre que je ne l'aurais abandonné"--and Rolland emphasizes that Péguy writes that Jeanne says this humbly, "humblement." 

"Humility in pride--or all armors, the most unbreakable [I am translating Rolland here]. Whatever Mme Gervaise may say, she is vanquished, and she knows it. Joan has stripped her implacably of all her veils, one after the other, of her eyes-shut optimism: she is forced to see in its bare reality the wretchedness of the world, the suffering of the world, the christianity that has sunk into perdition...her resistance is futile, her denials also. [..] Joan, weary, dismisses her with a brusque 'Adieu.' This young girl has sent packing that imperious woman. And that woman lets herself be dismissed, without protest."

And it's at this moment that Péguy gives Joan a vision of Orléans. 

Rachel Cusk, _Second Place_

ODD TO SAY, but this novel seemed to me like a long-delayed sequel to Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God (1930). 

As Lewis saw the history of western art, for long centuries artists—painters, composers, sculptors, poets—had been seen as skilled craftsmen whose main work was to celebrate whatever those rich enough to hire them—the church and the nobility—wished to have celebrated (mainly themselves, their learning, their piety, etc.). This may not have been exactly the work the artists would have chosen to do, but they at least made a living.

Along came the French Revolution, the Romantic cult of the genius, etc. Now the bourgeois have all the money; they are the ones who can afford to award commissions to produce artistic celebrations of whatever they want celebrated. In the meantime, though, the cultural prestige of art has risen considerably.   Being Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Beethoven is a much bigger deal than being a pope, or the earl of something, or even a king, and certainly a bigger deal than being a railroad magnate. 

So, according to Lewis, by the 1920s the bourgeoisie don’t want to commission art. They want to be artists. They want to hang out with artists, be recognized by artists as artists, have their work exhibited or published or performed alongside those of real artists. In the 600-something pages of The Apes of God, he dissects how dire a situation this bourgeois envy of creativity produces for actual art and actual artists.

Cusk’s novel is a good deal more focused, at 180 pages, and a good deal more sympathetic to the bourgeois desire to connect to art, but it describes the same situation. In a brief note at the end, Cusk explains that the novel was inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, about a short but dreadful period of providing D. H. Lawrence with a place to live and work.

Luhan may have been hoping for some kind of recognition of her intellectual acumen from Lawrence, or gratitude, or just a feeling of being taken seriously. She gets nothing of the kind—nor does the narrator of Second Place get anything of the kind from L, the painter whom she allows to take up residence in a small extra house on her property. L. seems to resent the narrator’s wealth, or his dependence upon it, or perhaps is frustrated by the ebbing of his own career, but however we account for the tension, it goes from bad to worse to horrible.

As in a Wyndham Lewis novel, no one comes off well. The narrator does at least get to something that sounds like self-understanding near the end:

I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

Even those “momentary flashes of insight” may be just wishful thinking, though. And L—though we may well be a brilliant painter—just seems like a grouchy, entitled pain in the ass.

Wondering whether to resume reading Jonathan Franzen’s _Crossroads_

 I WAS READING this in the summer of 2022; I got to p. 242 and just ran out of gas.

The novel is set in a Midwestern suburb at the early end of the 1970s, and “Crossroads” is the name of a church youth group that looms large in the lives of the novel’s main characters. Russ Hildebrandt is a senior pastor at the church (unspecified mainline Protestant) where the Crossroads group meets, but he has been excluded from its activities for being too perceptibly covetous of an assistant pastor’s standing as guru of the group. One of his sons, Clem, belonged to the group but is now in college; sister Becky and brother Perry are current members. Then there is Mom, Marion, and another son, still in grade school.

I stopped reading because each of the Hildebrandts is profoundly unappealing. I know that is wrong of me, having spent much of my career trying to cajole students out of “hating” a book because they find its characters unsympathetic. The Hildebrandts are not anguished like Raskolnikov, though, or perverse but articulate like Valmont or Humbert Humbert, or scrappy and unscrupulous like Becky Sharp. They are just selfish and obtuse in humdrum ways.

Reverend Russ is trying to start an affair with a divorced congregant. Chip off the old block Becky is trying to undermine Crossroads’ most charismatic male’s relationship with his girlfriend. Perry sells pot to middle schoolers. Meanwhile, other Hildebrandts have consciences that are, if anything, overactive. Marion is tying herself in knots over an episode of promiscuity that happened before her marriage to Russ. Clem has decided his student exemption from the draft is unwarranted class privilege, so he has dropped out and promptly informed his draft board.

So, once again, Franzen is interested in knotty ethics questions (see Purity and Freedom) and middle class American families that are a good deal more messed-up than appearances suggest (see all his other novels).

But, thanks to Kevin Kruse, I now wonder whether Franzen is exploring one of the more interesting cultural questions of US history in the second half of the 20th century: that is, how did mainline Protestantism collapse? For most of American history, it defined the mainstream of American spiritual life, and in the mid-1950s seemed more dominant than ever. Now, it seems defined by big empty downtown churches with aging congregations while the evangelicals are power brokers in the Republican party. 

The early 1970s might just be a crucial breaking point, and the Hildebrandts might be an insight into why things broke the way they did. I’m just about persuadedI should pick it up again.

Sam Riviere, _Dead Souls_

SO MANY NOVELS of late have no table of contents. This bothers me.  The new Zadie Smith novel, for instance (which I am enjoying very much so far), has chapters that are both numbered and titled and moreover divided into eight "volumes" (not literally--it's all one book). all these carefully designated parts, but no table of contents. Frustrating.

Poet Sam Riviere's first novel has a table of contents, I am pleased to report, one I found myself consulting frequently, and moreover has one in spite of the fact that it has no chapters, not even divisions indicated by blank pages or extra spacing. In fact, his novel is all one paragraph from beginning to end. By having recourse to the table of contents, however, a reader can quickly locate the pages on which one or another character had been mentioned earlier--an indispensable aid, given the monolithic presentation of the text.

Riviere thus had me as an ally before his novel even commenced, and everything after that confirmed me a stalwart in his camp. For one thing, the novel is very reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard. This could have gone very wrong, of course, but here it is skillfully sustained. 

For another, the writing is consistently surprising, keen-eyed, and even graceful (even when it goes in for some of the intentionally graceless Bernhardian effects, á la Correction). 

Best of all, the novel, even given its swirly four-in-the-morning surrealist streaks, persuasively presents the world of contemporary poetry. The (unnamed) narrator is a poet, or former poet, who edits a literary quarterly and whose duties have  taken him to the Literature Zone of the Festival of Culture taking place at the Royal Festival Hall. All of which suggests that poetry is a matter of crucial, even central cultural significance and is lavishly supported...which it is, in a way. At the Festival, everyone is gossiping about the disgrace of poet Solomon Wiese, who has been caught plagiarizing and has also been bad boyfriend. All of which suggests that poetry is just a tiny, spiteful coterie of people relentlessly undermining each other while pursuing an activity no one else in the world cares about...which is also true, in a way. Riviere convincingly portrays poetry's' paradoxical situation of somehow being quite important and not at all important at the very same time.

Soon the narrator finds Solomon Wiese himself, and we get his story--as well as some stories within his story, and stories within those stories, in a delightfully Bernhardian matryoshka doll of a novel.If I were a graduate student still, I would diagram them all out for you...but I'm not, so I won't.

Dead Souls reminded me of Douglas Kearney's Optic Subwoof, very different book though that is (not a novel, for one thing), in that it gives a sense of the contemporary Anglophone poetry world that is wickedly funny and irreverent while also being lucid and earnest. 

Kevin Kruse, _One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America_

 I AM OLD enough to have been in school when the Supreme Court decided prayer in public school was unconstitutional. In first grade, we had a prayer at the start of the day, right alongside the Pledge of Allegiance, and the occasional Bible story along with our mid-morning milk and graham crackers. In second grade...no prayer, no Bible stories. I didn't miss either, and my parents did not seem at all bothered by the change, but the outcry in other households was loud enough to get a movement for a constitutional amendment started.

Kevin Kruse explains that the loudness of the outcry had a lot to do with the wall of separation between church and state having been shaved down to wafer thinness during the Eisenhower years, the years when "In God We Trust" officially became the U.S. motto and the phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance. Attending "the church of your choice," as the slogan of the time put it, became almost a civic duty. The Supreme Court decision on school prayer was the first check the 1960s delivered to this steady incursion of religiosity into public life...but not the last. 

Behind this incursion, Kruse argues (and his subtitle indicates), was "corporate America," or more precisely what he calls "Christian libertarianism," i.e., the idea that capitalism and Christianity were perfectly congruent with each other, even uniquely well-suited for each other. This idea, he explains, arose in the 1930s as a way to muster public opinion against the New Deal, but only really took off in the Cold War. Since communism was atheistic, capitalism must be Christian. Americans and their allies must be the new Chosen People; God must be in favor of free markets and opposed to unions and minimum wage laws.

Kruse does not look closely into what these arguments looked like, but one has to wonder. Both the Old and the New Testaments urge relieving the poor and scorn the accumulation of riches as a vanity. How do you get an ally of capitalism out of that? Ayn Rand's ruthless atheistic materialism seems a better match, really. It must have required fancy footwork.

In an interesting irony, as Kruse makes clear, the crucial opposition that arrested the progress of the school prayer amendment was not the ACLU or secularists, but the churches themselves--not just the non-Christian faiths, but the National Council of Churches, the  Roman Catholic church, and even the Southern Baptist Convention. Why? Because they saw, as Tocqueville saw back in 1830s, that the separation of church and state was the best ally American religion ever had.

School prayer has never come back, but Kruse traces the many ways the idea that the USA ought to be officially Christian continued to influence our politics fro the 1970s forward--the prayer breakfasts, the photographs with Billy Graham, the inescapable "God bless America" at the end of presidential speeches.