Lydia Davis, _Can't and Won't_

DAVIS IS BEST knownfor her none-more-short short stories, some just a sentence or two long, little needle-bullets of fiction that you barely feel as they go in but somehow leave a crater you notice only minutes later.

There are plenty of those here, a lot of them based on passages from Flaubert's letters or Davis's own dreams, but the most memorable stories here (to my mind) are the handful of longer ones, all slow-cookers, near-plotless gradual accumulations of detail that by the end overwhelm you.      

"Local Obits": probably just what the title implies, sentences pulled from obituaries in the local newspaper, some as banal as possible ("Albert was an animal lover"), some of haunting particularity ("She will also be remembered for her extensive collection of elephant figurines"), but over ten pages somehow teetering perfectly between the idea that each of us is unique and the idea that really we are all the same,

"The Seals": memories of the life and death of an older sister, seemingly in no particular order, without much overt emotion, but by the end, I was shaken.

"The Letter to the Foundation": a foundation that has awarded the narrator some whopping big grant would like to know how it has changed her life. The narrator explains, very diplomatically, and with due gratitude to their generosity, exactly why it is her life has not changed so very much. Samuel Johnson, who also noticed that much-anticipated outcomes often wind up making less difference than we expected them to, would have loved this story.

And my very favorite, "The Cows." Working at a house in the country, the narrator can see from her windows a neighbor's cows. The story is nothing but a series of observations about the cows, e.g., "They are nearly the same size, and yet one is the largest, one the middle-sized, and one the smallest," but as one observation succeeds another, the cows progress from being a distraction from work to being a welcome distraction, even a relief, and then an object of interest in their own right, and eventually a mute testimony to some wide truth:

They are still out there, grazing, at dusk. But as the dusk turns to dark, while the sky above the woods is still a purplish blue, it is harder and harder to see their black bodies against the darkening field. Then they can't be seen at all, but they are still out there, grazing in the dark.

Compton Mackenzie, _Extraordinary Women_

SO, THIS IS the other English novel focusing on lesbian characters published in 1928. It appeared just a month after Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, in fact, but did not run into any of the censorship or legal troubles that Hall's novel did. Because Mackenzie was male? Because Extraordinary Women is comical rather than earnest? One wonders.

So far as posterity goes, Mackenzie's novel came a long way short of the fame eventually achieved by   Hall's, but it is a brisk and enjoyable read. It is set shortly after World War I on the island of Sirene (based on Capri) and tracks the alliances, antagonisms, passions, and vendettas of a cosmopolitan group of lesbians, mostly wealthy, or formerly wealthy (in the case of the Russian emigrées), or expecting to be wealthy (in the cased of Rosalba Donsante, who stands to inherit her aunt's fortune).

The dominant characters are Rory Fremantle and Olimpia Leigh, both a little older, both of independent means, both intellectually formidable, and both for the moment intrigued by the impulsive and beautiful Rosalba. She flirts recklessly with both, and with a few other members of the cast. How will this resolve?

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell.

"With the exception of Rory Freemantle, the charcters and events in Extraordinary Women are all based upon real people and actual events," writes Andro Linklater in the introduction to the paperback edition I read, mentioning Romaine Brooks and Renata Borgatti. At least a few people think that Rory is based on Radclyffe Hall. I hope she is, because Rory is a lot more interesting--wittier, more commanding, perhaps even of deeper spiritual resources--than Stephen Gordon, the character in The Well of Loneliness that Hall based on herself. Even though the novel is mainly comic, it has its moments of emotional power, and most of them involve Rory.

Mackenzie apparently got to observe this set from near at hand because many of them were friends with his wife, Faith. And even though he is less than reverential, not even very charitable, and often even willing to mock, the novel is invaluable, I'd say, in giving us a portrait, caricatured though it is, of these women who were, as the title says, extraordinary.

No fewer than three delightful chapters (16-18) are devoted to a party at Rory's villa, and I will close with Mackenzie's philosophy of parties:

A great party should be a world within a world, not a world temporarily outside it. It should effect a heightening and a concentration of ordinary life, so that in retrospect one may perceive the quintessential selvcs of the guests; and when those guests meet each other for the first time after such a party they should feel a kind of sacred elation such as we may suppose was felt by those who had been initiated into the Mysteries.

Stacy Schiff, _Cleopatra: A Life_

IS STACY SCHIFF related to Sidney Schiff? I know Sidney had some American cousins.

To move to a more pertinent question: does Stacy Schiff read ancient Greek and Latin? Presumably, a biographer of Cleopatra would at least know his or her way around the tongues in which the primary sources were written, but it's hard to tell here. Schiff thanks Inger Kuin, "who untangled awkward phrasings [in the translations] and reconciled contradictory ones"--that is, Schiff consulted Kuin about the passages where translations diverged?

Schiff obviously made a deep dive in the secondary literature on Cleopatra, her world, and her times, but I found myself wondering about her access to the primary texts because she reads them mainly against the grain, as it were. The surviving accounts of Cleopatra from her own day (or from within a few centuries of her own day) take a Roman perspective--dismissive of Cleopatra's character and abilities, viewing her defeat with relief and a bit of Roman self-congratulation. A classic illustration of the old saying that the winners write the histories.

Schiff isn't buying it. Rather than the femme fatale who came within a hair of dominating Rome by seducing its rulers, Schiff's Cleopatra is well-educated, a skillful adminstrator, a shrewd strategist, a devoted mother (even while being a sister on whom one should not turn one's back).

This sounds credible--but I wish Schiff had said more about where she found this Cleopatra. By reading against the grain in the Cassius Dio, et alia? In archeological findings? In the secondary sources?

This is a biography more for a general readership than for specialists, so my questions may not matter. Schiff certainly sounds credible, even though the grounds for her conclusions are not always spelled out, and the writing is as brisk and enlivening as a spring wind.

Jessa Crispin on Ben Lerner

BONE TO PICK, number 1,017:

Jessa Crispin, formerly of Topeka, took issue with Ben Lerner's The Topeka School in Baffler 50, writing, "The Topeka School's Topeka is not a Topeka I recognize, at least culturally." Oddly, the specifics she cites to illustrate the non-Topeka-ness of Lerner's Topeka are drawn from Lawrence and Kansas City, not Topeka, but let's leave that aside for now and simply consider the proposition, "This author's X is not an X I recognize." What does it mean?

Does it mean "This book would be a better book if it better reflected my own experience of X"? But that's silly, isn't it? Do two people ever have quite the same impression of any place? If you want a book that better reflects your own sense of X, why don't you write it?

Does it mean "This book is not fair to X and will give readers the wrong idea of X." This might be a fair objection if the book were non-fiction. But are novels supposed to be fair? Joyce's Buck Mulligan, we could say, is hardly fair to Oliver St. John Gogarty, from whom Joyce appropriated several characteristics in creating Mulligan. Does that matter? Plenty of people would say (have said) Joyce was not fair to Dublin, either. Sinclair Lewis was not fair to Sauk Centre. Jane Austen was not fair to Bath. Novelists are under no obligation to be fair.

And assuredly no novelist writing about Topeka is obliged to be fair to Lawrence or Kansas City.

Crispin's piece is a Baffler "Outburst," and hence supposed to be grouchy and intemperate, so it's a success in that respect, but "This author's X is not an X I recognize" is a formula overdue for retirement.

Ben Lerner, _The Topeka School_

THREE FOR THREE--Lerner is batting 1.000 as a novelist, and this one tries some new tricks. The character circumstanced much like Lerner himself is called Adam Gordon this time, but in a swerve from Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 the story is set in the past, when Adam was in high school, rather than in the near-present, and we get the point of view not just of Adam, but also of his parents Jonathan and Jane, both of whom are psychotherapists at a famous clinic located in Topeka (as were Lerner's own parents).

In the first chapter, Adam walks into what he thinks is his girlfriend's family's lakefront house, only to realize slowly that it some other family's house, a mistake enabled by the identical floor-plans and nearly identical furnishings of the neighborhood homes. The vertiginous moment when Adam imagines all the lakefront living rooms superimposed on each other, eerily one and many at the same time, establishes a leitmotif of the novel--but the leitmotif usually functions not in space, but in time, the present uncannily nearly-matching the past. For instance, here Jonathan is on his way to New York, on his way back to Topeka, and in the middle of infidelity, all seemingly at once:

He [Adam] hung up the phone, collected his keys and cigarettes, and left his room on the ninth floor, its windows open to the storm Without noticing, he passed the doorway in which Sima and I were going at it, and got in the elevator. I was traveling furiously toward him in the dark. I was in the plane, cleared to land, flash of distant lightning. The metal doors shut, the landing gear unfolded, and we made our descent, first person and third, together through the clouds. Jane had talked us down. 

Spaces rhyme, moments in time rhyme. Does the novel rely on one of the insights of psychotherapy, that we unconsciously re-trace past patterns, keep re-enacting our past?

Even psychological crises rhyme, as different characters react to fear of being left behind. Jane's publishing a book that makes her famous precipitates some trust-violating intimacy between Jonathan and Jane's mentor Sima; Adam's and friends' imminent departures for prestigious colleges precipitates a terrible assault by Darren, their friend from pre-school who dropped out of high school. And Darren's abruptly throwing a cue ball at a girl's head in someone's basement rec room somehow imposes itself on Adam, now a parent himself, as he writes the novel:

This is 1909; this is 1983; this is early spring 1997 seen from 2019, from my daughters' floor, dim glow of the laptop, "Clair de lune" playing in a separate window [of the building? of the laptop?], as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony plays in the basement.

This superimposition of the similar--this rhyming--is all the more effective in that Lerner does not particularly underline it until the story's coda, when an episode in which he challenges another man for being a negligent parent gives way to a scene in which he is challenged for being a negligent parent. Or--given that the coda is titled "Thematic Apperception"--is the parallel just a readerly projection?

When we say a novel is poetic, we usually (and unfortunately) mean it has extended, eventless passages of description, but this one is poetic in its structure, in the way it uses juxtaposition to create meaning.

Gregory Woods, _Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World_

THE SUBTITLE IS misleading, I would say, insofar as it suggests the book has a central argument along the lines of "Gay culture liberated the modern world by...," along with definitions of "gay," "modern," and "liberated." This is not that book (though Woods could write that book, I expect). This is something more like a survey of LGBTQ presence in and contribution to a variety of artistic and cultural milieus in (mainly, but not exclusively) Europe during (mainly, but not exclusively) the years  from World War I to the 1960s.

Was the subtitle the publisher's idea, I wonder?

Well, whoever does write a book about gay culture liberating the modern world will definitely profit from keeping this book at their elbow. There's been nothing like it since Jeffrey Meyers's serviceable but long outdated Homosexuality and Literature, and Woods's book is not only more up-to-date, but also more detailed, more comprehensive, and better grounded in the culture it studies. It is a great complement to Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization, which only gets as far as about 1800; Woods's scholarship rivals Crompton's but his style (thankfully) is not as dry.

As someone particularly interested in Anglophone literature between the world wars, I can only say the book is a goddamn goldmine.

Anyone out there wondering what "Homintern" means? It's a British joke dating to the 1930s, authorship disputed (as Woods discusses). The "Comintern" was shorthand for the Third Communist International, supposedly the master committee for international co-ordination among Communist parties, but in fact Moscow-dominated and eventually little more than another instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It had a reputation for being a network of manipulation of unguessable extent, and some wit (Auden? Connolly?) adopted the word to express the idea that literary homosexuals too had a kind of support network of unguessable extent, manipulating who reviewed what, who got which editorial post, etc.

Sounds insidious, right? Because straight male writers never indulge in log-rolling, or give their friends hyperbolic blurbs, or nudge grants and appointments in certain ways, or abuse their privileges in any way whatsoever. Yep, everything fair and above board.

So the book's title is a joke on the joke. Did 20th century gay writers know each other, network with each other, support each other? Yes, sometimes, and we're all the better off because they did.

James McCourt, _Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life_, part the second

SO, AS I was saying, Queer Street does not seem like the history of a culture, or the history of a milieu, since its co-ordinates align almost point-for-point with those of James McCourt's own personal history. The narrative goes to England when McCourt goes to England, to Hollywood when he goes to Hollywood.

For all that, it does not seem like a memoir, either. For one thing, McCourt studiously avoids first person singular pronouns. He  refers to himself only as "the author," or as "Queer Temperament," as though he was the milieu's embodiment.

Perhaps Queer Street is like those middle volumes of Á la recherche de temps perdue, Le côté de chez Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe? Those volumes are likewise about a specific scene or milieu at a certain moment in history, but likewise also definitely from the viewpoint of one particular participant observer.

What is not at all like Proust, though, is the heterogeneity of the text, which includes a Browning-esque dramatic monologue in blank verse, essays on Douglas Sirk and Raymond Carver (whom McCourt valued well before those two figures were safely canonical), and an interview with Bette Davis.

Perhaps it is Proustlike in that Queer Street is partly about McCourt's enthusiasm--save that instead of Berma we hear about Holly Woodlawn, instead of Bergotte we hear about Dennis Cooper.

No--I have to stick with my earlier view (Loads of Learned Lumber, 1/17.2020) that McCourt is quite a bit more like Joyce than he is like Proust. Impenitently allusive, encyclopedically knowledgeable about all sorts of arcana, with more syntactic resources at his command than any other dozen writers. And Irish. And Catholic.

Actually, maybe it is most like Whittaker Chambers's Witness--? An utterly sui generis American classic about a particular historical milieu at a particular historical juncture, from the point of view of a highly unorthodox intelligence who happens to be a born writer, deeply and regrettably unlikely to find its way onto any course's syllabus.