42nd Parallel

First, as an introduction to Dos Passos, who – if you are anything like I was until recently (and only because of my book list obsession) – you have never heard of, some quotes:

“[He’s] the greatest living writer of our time.” -Jean Paul Sartre, 1938

“Dos Passos came nearer than any of us to writing the Great American Novel, and it’s entirely possible he succeeded. I can only say, from my own point of view, that no novel I read while in college stimulated me more, astounded me more and showed me what a thrilling inner life was there for anyone gifted enough to be a major American novelist.” – Norman Mailer on Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy

Dos Passos created a “whole new school of writing.” - Sinclair Lewis, on Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer

One of the greatest pleasures of being a reader is not only discovering a hidden gem in a book, but finding a hidden gem in a new author…especially one that made you leery at first. I was not overly excited about John Dos Passos or his U.S.A. Trilogy. Even though basic research would/should have made me anticipate it with joy. A forgotten member of the Lost Generation? Contemporary and friend (sort of ) of Fitzgerald and Hemingway? This should have tipped me off. but instead, I was apprehensive about my ability to like Dos Passos. Somewhere along the line, he had become lumped in with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Not that I don’t sometimes enjoy Lewis and Dreiser (Main Street was one of my favorite books I read this year). They can just be a little daunting sometimes.

And then, lo and behold, I very quickly learned that I was oh so wrong in my apprehension. 42nd Parallel, the first volume of the trilogy, turned out to be FABULOUS!

42nd Parallel, published in 1930, tells the story of five characters: Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley, following them from all childhood until the beginning of America’s direct involvement in WWI. They’re all from different backgrounds, different places. Eventually they converge and begin to play parts in each others lives. They’re all trying to figure out where they fit in – where they fit in society, in the country, the new century, the political world - what their role could or should be. But it’s not a character study – Dos Passos isn’t trying to be Henry James and describe every minute detail…every motivation. It just goes – it moves…somewhere I saw Dos Passos’s writing described as “rapid-transit pace,” and that is an apt description.

Dos Passos calls his style "contemporary chronicle." The novel isn’t just these characters, and it’s not traditional narrative. The story of each is told intermittently from that characters point-of-view (but in the third person). This is interspersed with news headlines, song lyrics, biographies of famous or important people of the time, and what Dos Passos calls the “camera eye,” which I will post about later. And when I say biographies, I don’t mean, “so-and-so was born at this place, on this date, and here’s what he did.” Here’s two examples:

(From "The Electrical Wizard")

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in eighteen fortyseven;
Milan was a little town on the Huron River that for a while was the wheatshipping port for the whole Western Reserve; the railroads took away the carrying trade, the Edison family went up to Port Huron in Michigan to grow up with the country;
his father was a shinglemaker who puttered round with various small speculations; he dealt in grain and feed and lumber and built a wooden tower a hundred feet high; tourists and excursionists paid a quarter each to go up the tower and look at the view over Lake Huron and the St. Clair River and Sam Edison became a solid and respected citizen of Port Huron.

Thomas Edison only went to school for three months because the teacher thought he wasn't right bright. His mother taught him what she knew at home and read eighteenth century writers with him, Gibbon and Hume and Newton, and let him rig up a laboratory in the cellar.

Whenever he read about anything he went down cellar and tried it out.
When he was twelve he needed money to buy books and chemicals; he got a concession as a newsbutcher on the daily train from Detroit to Port Huron. In Detroit there as a public library and he read it...

He worked all day and all night tinkering with cogwheels and bits of copperwire and chemicals in bottles, whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made things work. He wasn't a mathematician. I can hire mathematicians but mathematicians can't hire me, he said.
In eighteen seventysix he moved to Menlo Park where he invented the carbon transmitter and made the telephone a commercial proposition, that made the microphone possible
he worked all day and all night and produced
the phonograph
the incandescent electric lamp

and systems of generation, distribution, regulation and measurement of electric current, sockets, switches, insulators, manholes. Edison worked out the first systems of electric light using a direct current and small unit lamps and the multiple arc that were installed in London Paris New York and Sunbury Pa., [YEAH SUNBURY!]
the threewire system
the magnetic ore separator,
an electric railway.

(I just had to make sure I included the part about Sunbury! It's friggin' awesome when you come from a small town without any nationally known import and then you come across it in a book of such importance.)

and from "Proteus"

In eighteen ninetytwo when Eichemeyer sold out the corporation that was to form General Electric, Steinmetz was entered in the contract along with other valuable apparatus. All his life Steinmetz was a piece of apparatus belonging to General Electric...
General Electric humored him, let him be a socialist, let him keep a greenhouseul of cactuses lit up by mercury lights, let him have alligators, talking crows and a gila monster for pets and the publicity department talked up the wizard, the medicine man who knew the symbols that opened all the doors of Ali Baba's cave...
Steinmetz was a famous magician and he talked to Edison tapping with the Morse code on Edison's knee
because Edison was so very deaf
and he went out West
to make speeches that nobody understood
and he talked to Bryan about God on a railroad train
and all the reporters stood round while he and Einstein
met face to face;
and but they couldn't catch what they said.

And Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of apparatus General Electric had
Until he wore out and died.

His narrative has a similar pace and rhythm as the biographies.

42nd Parallel is experimental and modern. You can see the coming generation of writers, and I was struck by the similartiy of cadence in Dos Passos as in Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. I don't know if Ginsberg read or was influenced by Dos Passos, but I can't imagine he wasn't. I know Kerouac was. He quotes U.S.A. Trilogy in his letters, and was reading Dos Passos (aloong with Dreiser, Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis) during the time he was outlining Dr. Sax. What I don’t understand is why, apart from my book lists, have I not heard of Dos Passos? Why isn’t he mentioned in school, in literary resources, along with Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Hemingway? Where did his reputation sour such that, while he was just as popular and important in the early 20th century as those others were, somehow he is now pretty much forgotten?

On average, I finish almost one book per week. Over the last 10 years, that means almost 500 books. Probably more than half of those are just ok. So far this year, I’ve read 53 books and looking at my list, less than 15 really stand out. So, to find a new author that really excites me…that’s what reading is all about. Jeanette Winterson, in one of her essays, says, “knowing that there are favorite books still to come is a continuing happiness.” That’s why I bother with book lists…for an increased chance to find those great authors. The chance that I would have picked up Dos Passos without his appearance on The Lists is probably relatively small. But I loved 42nd Parallel…I’m so glad I found it. I cannot wait to read the next two books in the trilogy, and his other work. A+ for this leading contender for the Great American Novel.

Music of 42nd Parallel

Just finishing up Volume 1 of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy: 42nd Parallel. Throughout the novel, there are two different interuptions in the story: Newsreels and Camera Eyes. In a future post I'll deal with the Camera Eye sections. The Newsreels are populated with actual newspaper headlines and stories along with lyrics from popular songs. Here are the songs from 42nd Parellel:

• Newsreel I - "There's Many a Man Been Murdered in Luzon"
• Newsreel II - "Alexander's Ragtime Band"
• Newsreel III - "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away"
• Newsreel IV - "My Alamo Love" (from The Tenderfoot)
• Newsreel VI - “Moonlight Bay” written by Edward Madden & Percy Wenrich (who I am related to)
• Newsreel VII - "Cheyenne," 1906, written by Harry Williams & Egbert Van Alstyne
• Newsreel VIII - "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie"
• Newsreel X - "Oh, You Beautiful Doll," 1911, written by Seymour Brown & Nat D. Ayer
• Newsreel XI - “I’m Going to Maxim’s” (From Frank Lehár’s The Merry Widow)
• Newsreel XII - “On the Banks of the Saskatchewan” written by C.M.S. McLellan & Ivan Caryll from The Pink Lady
• Newsreel XIII - "I've Got Rings On My Fingers," 1909, written by Weston and Barnes & Maurice Scott; and "La Cucaracha"
• Newsreel XIV - "Waiting For The Robert E. Lee," 1912
• Newsreel XV - "There's A Girl in the Heart of Maryland," 1913, written by MacDonald & Carroll
• Newsreel XVI - I couldn't find the song(s) mentioned in this newsreel. The lyrics are "I want to go to Mexico/Under the stars and stripes to fight the foe” and "And the ladies of the haren/Knew exactly how to wear ‘em/In oriental Bagdhad long ago.” This might be two songs, or it might be one.
• Newsreel XVII - "The Curse of an Aching Heart"
• Newsreel XVIII - "Its A Long Long Way To Tipperary," 1912, written by Jack Judge & Harry Williams
• Newsreel XIX - "Over There," 1917, written by George M. Cohan

Visions of Gerard

Without Gerard, what would have happened to Ti Jean? - Jack Kerouac

Visions of Gerard is Kerouac’s prolonged meditation on his older, saintly brother Gerard who died at the age of 9 (Jack was 4 at the time) of rheumatic fever. Out of all the Kerouac novels that I’ve read, my favorites are those that deal with his life in Lowell: Maggie Cassidy, Dr. Sax, and Visions of Gerard. Kerouac loved his hometown, and his love for it comes across very clearly in his novels. You can tell that this was what Kerouac loved…this was where his heart was. There has been a lot written about Kerouac, and most biographers agree that though he left Lowell after high school, he never left Lowell emotionally. In 1963 he said, “I have a recurring dream of simply walking around the deserted twilight streets of Lowell, in the mist, eager to turn every known and fabled corner. A very eerie, recurrent dream, but it always makes me happy when I wake up.” Jack belonged in Lowell…that was where his happiness would be. But he never was able to find it.

Some background: Kerouac was born in March 1922 at 9 Lupine Road, in Centralville, one of the Lowell, MA neighborhoods on the north side of the Merrimack River. Lowell had its hay-day during the late 19th-early 20th century when the banks of the river were crowded with textile mills. By the time Jack was born, however, Lowell was already declining, as the mills began to close.

Jack was the third child of Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, both French-Canadian immigrants who had met and married in Nashua, NH. Leo owned a print shop in Lowell and was “a hearty, outgoing burgher” and Gabrielle, aka Mémêre (everyone called her that), conducted the household in French (actually it was a Quebecquois patois known as joual). For one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century (like it or not, he was), Jack didn’t learn English until he went to school. Even as a teenager he had difficulty understanding spoken English.

Jack was baptized Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac, supposedly in honor of his French baron ancestor. (Jack made many claims about his ancestry, most interestingly that his mother was descended from Napoleon. When asked about the truth of it, he claimed it was “mostly” true, so take it with a grain of salt…more on some of that in subsequent posts) His father also claimed that the family had an ancestral shield, “blue with gold stripes accompanied by three silver nails” with the motto “Aimer, Travailler et Souffrir,” meaning Love, Work and Suffer. I’m not sure if Kerouac took that motto to heart, or if it served as some kind of oracle, but I have never found anything that better describes Jack’s short life.

Jack’s mother played an important – some say an unhealthily, Oedipus-ly important – role in Jack’s life. (He once said his mother was the only woman he ever loved.) She was devoutly Catholic, and wore religious medals attached to the strap of her slip. After Gerard’s death she became fiercely protective of Ti Jean (as Jack was known…that and Ti Pousse – little thumb; sometimes also le gros Pipi meaning little fatty), and that continued throughout his life. While his father Leo seemed indifferent and occasionally hostile to organized religion and its messengers, Mémêre instilled in Gerard and Jack (and his sister Caroline as well, I’m sure) a religious sensibility that I find apparent in all of Kerouac’s writings. Religion, his mother, and his background as a child of working class immigrants profoundly affected him, his writing, and his worldview. (The French Canadians in New England at the time were called “les blanc negres." Translate yourself.) Of course he went on to study Buddhism and do a lot of things that really were viewed as the antithesis of those influences, but at least in his writing, it’s clear that they are always there.

The central theme of the novel is why suffering exists. Not that the question is ever answered, but that’s the meditation. Kerouac also claimed to biographer Ann Charters that Visions of Gerard was influenced by Shakespeare’s Henry V. Not being overly familiar with the play, I can’t comment about how much those influences shine through, but later biographer Gerald Nicosia agreed that you could see some similarities, mostly in characterization.

Anyway, on to the book. This is Kerouac’s novel that most seamlessly blends dream and reality. He melds his recollections, his dreams, his visions, his mother’s anecdotes and his own imaginings into a tribute to a dying brother. As I said earlier, Gerard died of rheumatic fever, and was in a great deal of pain, particularly towards the end of his life. The story, obviously told from Jack’s point of view (though with imagined scenes of his father at work, playing poker, drinking with the guys) and so is filled with the things that a four-year-old would remember, or think was important. To Jack, Gerard really was angelic.

One story related of Gerard is that he once found a mouse in a trap (it wasn’t dead). He was horrified that someone would do this to one of God’s creatures. He brought the mouse home, bandaged it up, fed it and took care of it. Soon, the cat ate it, leaving the tale behind. Gerard scolded the cat. Not in the mean way that you would expect a child to scold an animal that just ate something it shouldn’t…instead he gives the cat a lecture that it shouldn’t harm others. Gerard and Jack’s father tries to explain to the boy that that happens in life – we eat stuff smaller than us. But Gerard wants none of it. “We’ll never go to Heaven if we go on eating each other and destroying each other like that all the time! –without thinking, without knowing!” There is the “heroic” tale of sickly Gerard walking to the store in the freezing cold to get aspirin for Mémêre who is laid up on the couch with a debilitating headache.

Gerard was in terrible pain from the rheumatism and Jack glosses over most of that, though it’s there…it’s just not in the forefront. This is the story of a 4-year-old and his brother, and a 4-year-old would not really notice that stuff. But Gerard – and this is part of the saintliness – suffers quietly, without complaint; despite his own pain, he brings home hungry neighborhood children for Mémêre to feed. “Unceasing compassion flows from Gerard to the world even while he groans in the very middle of his extremity.”

Gerard oversees Jack in a way, wanting him to be good. There is the story of when Jack, sitting on the floor, stabbed a picture of a murderess on the front page of the newspaper. Gerard scolds him, like he had scolded the cat who ate the mouse, and together they go and patch the newspaper back together, so the picture is as good as new. Though Gerard is mostly kind to Ti Jean (except when he slaps him for knocking over his erector set), there is some competition. He wonders why Gerard gets fed before he does, and states, “And there’s no doubt in my heart that my mother loves Gerard more than she loves me.”

And then there is Gerard’s otherworldliness. He falls asleep in class and dreams that the Virgin Mary came to get him with a white wagon pulled by two lambs. He tells his little brother about the color of God. He goes to confession where he tells the priest about a little boy who he pushed when the boy accidently knocked over something he was making. The priest asks if the boy was hurt; Gerard says no, “but I hurt his heart.” Near his death he tells Ti Jean, “God put these little things on earth to see if we want to hurt them – those who don’t do it who can, are for his Heaven—those who see they can hurt, and do hurt, they’re not for his Heaven –See?” The whole portrayal is of a child who is more than a child…a child who understands something about the world and about heaven that those around him don’t. He tries to explain that “We’re all in Heaven, but we don’t know it.” Kerouac puts the religious theme in the forefront here. All of his novels are religious novels at heart, but in some of them it’s hard to see it. When the doctor tells the Kerouacs that it is time to call for the priest, the nuns from Gerard's school come as well, knealing by his bedside, asking him questions and writing down the boys answers.

Then Gerard dies. Jack runs down the street towards his father on his way home, “gleefully…yelling, ‘Gerard est mort!’ as tho it was some great event…I thought it had something to do with some holy transformation that would make him greater and more Gerard like…so when he wearily just said ‘I know, Ti Pousse, I know” I had that same feeling that I have today when I would rush and tell people the good news that Nirvana, Heaven, Our salvation is Here and Now, that gloomy reaction of theirs, which I can only attribute to pitiful and so-to-be loved Ignorance of mortal brains.” After his death, the neighborhood women notice that the birds that Gerard had lovingly fed from his windowsill had gone, and they did not return. “‘They’re gone with him!’ Or, I’d say, ‘It was himself.’”

Nicosia includes some interesting stuff about Visions of Gerard in the biography. Apparently John Kingsland, whose name I never heard before, but who apparently read the unedited original draft of Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City, stated that some of the scenes that were edited out of The Town and the City are included in Visions of Gerard. Nicosia also notes Kerouac’s “use of Middle English alliterative stresses” and that some of the lines read like haiku. But I don’t tend to notice that type of stuff when reading.

In 1955, shortly after the famed 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco, which featured Allen Ginsberg’s performance of “Howl,” Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) left Kerouac in charge of his mentally unstable girlfriend of the moment, Natalie Jackson. Jack spent the afternoon trying to calm her manic episode with Buddhist texts, but it didn’t work. The next day she jumped from the window to her death. Jack was very disturbed by this, and he returned to his sister’s home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina shortly before Christmas. Of course his mother was there too. The experiences that would fill Kerouac’s future book, Dharma Bums, were occurring at this time. All of this happened before On the Road was published…remember, Kerouac wrote ELVEN books before OtR broke in September ’57.

In January 1956, Mémêre returned to New York to a funeral. It was then, in the absence of his mother, that Jack sat down to write what would become Visions of Gerard. “My sister and her husband weren’t interested. They went to bed and I took over the kitchen, brewed tea and took Benzedrine. It was written by hand on the kitchen table. My sister wouldn’t let me light candles, so I used the kitchen light. You got to live with your family, you know. Mémêre wasn’t there. She went to the funeral of her step-mother in Brooklyn. If she’d been there, I wouldn’t have written it. We’d have talked all night. But that funeral reminded me of funerals, my brother’s funeral…” He stated that had Mémêre been there, the book wouldn’t have been written because they just would have talked about it.

At the time of writing Visions of Gerard, Kerouac was synthesizing his two religions…Catholicism and Buddhism. To say that Kerouac was a devout Catholic is to imply that he was a practicing Catholic, which he was not. But he continued throughout his life to maintain his belief in Catholicism, devotion to saints, etc. He was Catholic in his heart, and Jack was devout in his own way. His beliefs at the time can probably be summed up in the words he says Gerard’s "sad eyes first foretold": All is Well, practice Kindness, Heaven is Nigh.

How long it took Keroauc to write Visions of Gerard is debatable. Some books say 10 days, some 12, some say it was a lie when he said it took such a short amount of time. He wrote a letter to Gary Snyder on 1/15/56 (or thereabouts) telling him he had finished, and chronologically it appears that Mémêre had left for the funeral in January (not December), so it really couldn’t have been that long. But then again, there are two different dates to be considered: the date he finished the writing process, and the date the actual book was finished, after edits, etc. Jack talked a good game about how long it actually took him to write his novels and about how he would never alter his writing after its initial outflow, but from what I’ve read and heard, I think to some extent that was a load of crap…building up the image of himself that he wanted the world to believe.

Whatever the truth, shortly after he was apparently finished, Jack wrote a letter to his friend calling it his “best most serious sad and true book yet,” and reiterated this in letters as late as 1961 (still two years before it would be published.) By late ’56, Kerouac had submitted the book to Viking, where Malcolm Cowley objected to its Buddhist influences; Cowley didn’t see how it related to Jack’s French-Canadian upbringing. In response to requests to revise the novel, Jack told his agent, “Visions of Gerard suits me as it stands. As it comes, so it flows, and that’s literature at its purest.” But by ’58, Kerouac was telling Viking that he would revise and substitute the Buddhist overtones with Catholic references if they would buy the book. He really wanted the book to be published, mostly to counteract his growing image as an encourager of youthful rebellion. He wrote, Visions of Gerard “is by far the wisest next book for me because of present screaming about my juvenile delinquent viciousness.”

The book (along with Big Sur) was eventually bought in January 1962 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy for a $10,000 advance. When it was sold, Kerouac’s editor promised not to make changes to it, but I don’t know if any changes were made between its original writing (which was done in pencil) and its final version. In December of that year, he wrote to his friend Philip Whalen. “I’m proofreading Visions of Gerard…[it] will be published by Fall 1963 and will be ignored I guess, or called pretentious, but who cares…” Well, Jack cared. For all the nonchalantness of that statement, Jack couldn’t stand negative reviews, which typically not only ripped his books to shreds, but Kerouac as a person as well. He also told Whalen that the publication of Visions of Gerard meant one less reason for him to stay alive, but he was hanging on for his mother’s sake. His drinking wasn’t just alcoholism. It was his own form of suicide, and he intended it for that purpose.

Visions of Gerard wasn’t exactly ignored, but the reviews were bad. The New York Herald Tribune stated it was, “a text very much like everything else [Kerouac] has published in the past five years: slapdash, grossly sentimental, often so pridefully “sincere” that you can’t help question the value of sincerity itself…in someone else’s hands, it could have been moving. Even in Kerouac’s own hands, it could have been good, if only he had made writerly demands of himself. As it stands, though, it just amounts to 152 more pages of self-indulgence.” Sure, it’s sentimental, maybe overly so (biographer Nicosia did admit it was overwritten), but gosh, I don’t even know what to say about questioning Kerouac’s sincerity over the death of his brother. Seriously.

In a letter to fellow writer and friend John Clellon Holmes, Jack said “everybody’s become so mean, so sinister, so hypocritical I can’t believe it. So I turn to drink like a lost maniac…They make me feel like never writing another word again.” It made me sad when I read that. Kerouac’s entire identity was as a writer, and all he wanted was to be taken seriously. He was physically declining since On the Road came out, specifically because of the notoriety it brought him. He was so self-conscious, and the press had turned him into everything that he wasn’t.

By 1964, Kerouac began to TRY to separate himself from his friends, specifically Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He no longer wanted to be associated with the things that were being laid at his feet. “…I am sick of them and all their beatnik friends. I want you to know that Visions of Gerard published last year is the beginning of my new feelings about life, strictly back to my original feelings in Lowell, of a New England French Canadian Catholic & solitary nature. What these bozos and their friends are up to now is simply the last act in their original adoption and betrayal of any truly “beat” credo. They have used “beat” for their own ends...” I will write more in the future about the evolution of beat to beatnik, and its commoditization, etc. He wanted to get out from under this mantel they put on him, and he just couldn’t.

Visions of Gerard is almost a prolonged religious homily to his brother, who in his mind – and the mind of his mother – was a saint. But while this novel does have an overarching religious theme to it, it is a very sad tale. Jack was absolutely devoted to his brother…he worshipped and emulated him in a way probably most boys would look up to an older brother. "For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness." It appears to have been very traumatic for Jack losing Gerard, his casket in the front room. He grew frightened of the dark and of shadows and often wondered how he could get to heaven to be reunited with his beloved brother. For a short time after his brother’s death, Jack even thought Gerard would return in some resurrected form, “huge and all-powerful and renewed.”

One of Gerard’s playmates when the family lived on Beaulieu Street (where Gerard died) told an interviewer that Jack largely embellished the story of Gerard’s saintliness – he thought Gerard was a normal kid, just sickly. The myth of Gerard was most likely encouraged by Mémêre…though Jack’s memories of his brother probably reinforced it. What Jack remembers is his brother’s piety, his kindness. At his death bed, Gerard was surrounded by the nuns from his parochial school, who recorded the boy’s words. Gerard had explained the crucifixion to Jack while walking around the Grotto in Lowell…a replica of the one at Lourdes.

Jack said once, “I have followed [Gerard] ever since, because I know he’s up there guiding my every step.” Jack idolized Gerard, and used his piety as a standard against which he measured his own life…and he knew he failed miserably against that standard.

I feel that I have to say this as a post-script: Kerouac is not for everyone. I know that some people just absolutely can’t stand him, and that’s fine. His first few novels are probably his most accessible because as time went on he began to experiment with spontaneous writing, which is a more stream of consciousness style. And it didn’t help that his alcoholism just got worse and worse as his infamousness and notoriety increased and as negative reviews and personal attacks increased. Some of his work is embarrassing. Some of it is genius. Most is somewhere in between. What is more important for me, to some extent, is to get what he was trying to do. In some ways, he was trying to be another James Joyce…not an imitation of Joyce but to push the boundaries of “the novel” forward, to explore new territory with it. He considered himself a jazz poet, or jazz writer, meaning he was taking cues from what was going on in jazz at the time (mainly Charlie Parker) and applying the improvisational style of bop to writing. Kerouac took his writing and himself as a writer very seriously. His work has been hugely influential – on the writing, art, music, movies, our language, etc. On the Road ushered in all of that. Kerouac did not see that as a positive, nor did most of the mainstream “squares” at the time. But the ripples are still being felt, still showing themselves in new ways. Despite this, despite how he did help usher in the hippie/1960s movement to some extent (no matter how much he HATED being “accused” of that, it’s true), which most people today probably see as having a generally positive cultural influence overall, he still isn’t really taken seriously. I’ve been reading a book called Empty Phantoms, which is interviews, magazine articles, tv appearance transcripts, etc. of Kerouac and about Kerouac, and it’s making me very angry and sad. He was DERIDED in the press…absolutely raked over the coals, both as a writer and as a person. It’s really depressing to read this stuff, knowing how it hurt him, how it lead him to drink himself to death. All he wanted to be seen as was a writer – not a cultural icon, not a voice of a generation – just a writer. But they wouldn’t let him be just a writer. More on this will come as we get further into Jack’s life, but I felt I needed to start out saying that.

"The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink...because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero - Écrivez pour l'amour de son mort."

Prelude to Kerouac

Whenever my life starts to get chaotic, I turn to Keroauc. I don’t know why. It started in ’97 when my best friend died. I had purchased On the Road a few years prior…probably ’95. I had read an article about R.E.M. where they asked each band member what their favorite books were. Both Michael Stipe and Peter Buck answered On the Road. Peter Buck said he read it every year between the ages of 14 and 27. Michael Stipe said it was the only book he had ever read twice. This was when I was in love with Michael Stipe. Obviously I had to read it. When I really like someone, I want to immerse myself in their influences – music, books, art, whatever. I guess that I know I can find myself in the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to…so why can’t I find other people in their books and movies and music as well? Anyway, I’m getting off track.

I tried to read On the Road a few times, and didn’t get very far. Sometimes a book needs to hit at the right moment or it’s just not going to work. I picked it up again in ’97. And that was the right place, right time. I was 16 years old, and what better book to read when you’re 16? It was perfect. I was completely blown away by everything about it. And in some way, I probably fell in love with Kerouac because I started to do the stuff that I do when I like somebody – I follow their influences. Kerouac referenced a Billie Holiday song…I had to track down the song. I had to track down Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk. I was reading the books he read, listening to the music he listened to (and raiding my grandfather's record collection in the mean time), watching the movies he saw, etc. It’s become almost a life-long project, because 11 years later, I’m still doing the same thing. I had always been a strange kid, but now I was the 16-year-old listening to jazz and reading Thomas Wolf and William S. Burroughs. On the Road, for me, became THE BOOK. It still is.


And then Amy died. We met when we were 6 or 7 and had been inseparable ever since. We were the weird kids together. We sometimes even dressed alike…yeah, even when we were 14, 15, 16 we were still coordinating outfits. "Let’s both wear the same t-shirt on the same day and paint our fingernails black…" At one point in time this might have been what everybody did, but not then. This was when Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were popular. We dated guys who were also best friends, and “cruised” around town blasting White Zombie, hanging out in cemeteries after dark, driving over the railroad tracks too fast in Jeremy’s Geo…sometimes with his younger brother in the trunk section (it was a hatchback) because there wasn’t enough room for us all.

She died, and my first impulse was to go back to On the Road. I had read it for the first time only maybe 2 months before, and already it had taken on that role in my life. It has served that role ever since.

As I started out saying, whenever there’s chaos, that’s where I go to. When things don't seem right, when things aren't going right, I always find my way back to Kerouac. When there is frustration, sadness, upheaval, there is Jack.

I started last Friday night by going to the “Kerouac” shelf – he has his own shelf – and pretty much pulling everything off…his biographies, letters, journals, books of photographs, books of essays about him, in addition to his novels. I finally have the motivation to work on a project I have been planning for a long time: read all Kerouac’s novels in chronological order of the time period in his life he was writing about - not in the order they were published, which would be a different way to look at them…the development of his life versus the development of his writing style (for better or worse).

First up: Visions of Gerard

James Baldwin Cuts a Rug

This photo KILLS me!

Poetry Friday

A funny story: Once my 11th grade english teacher had this poetry book that he was reading from. I don't remember the specifics, but he must have been asking the class about what poets they liked, and then reading from the book. I said I liked Allen Ginsberg. The poor teacher, I don't know if he had any idea. He starts reading this poem out loud to the class, and it becomes obvious very quickly that it was not an appropriate poem to read aloud to a group of 16 year olds. The teacher was embarrassed, but we all thought it was hillarious.

I tried to figure out what poem that was. My first inclination is that it was "Sunflower Sutra," but that doesn't really have anything naughty in it. But then again, what seems scandalous when you're 16 usually is a lot less so more than a decade later. So, instead of posting what I had originally intended, which was that poem - whatever one it might be - I will share my favorite Ginsberg poem.

A Supermarket in California

     What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, forI walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headacheself-conscious looking at the full moon.
    In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I wentinto the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
    What peaches and what penumbras! Whole familiesshopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in theavocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, whatwere you doing down by the watermelons?

    I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
    I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed thepork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
    I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cansfollowing you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
    We strode down the open corridors together in oursolitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozendelicacy, and never passing the cashier.

    Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close inan hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
    (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in thesupermarket and feel absurd.)
    Will we walk all night through solitary streets? Thetrees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

   Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of lovepast blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
   Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry andyou got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boatdisappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Cherished Books

Other than family stuff – photos, old bibles, lockets, journals, my grandfather’s varsity letter, etc. – the objects that I cherish most are my books. Some have been with me for so long, I cannot imagine being separated from them, and they have become so much more than their text. For example, I LOVE The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter…(I could go on here), but I could easily change my edition for another. As I was writing that, I realized maybe that isn’t true. When I first read To Kill A Mockingbird, I was using my mom’s edition – a 1960s trade paperback with yellowed pages. Over the years, I found myself a newer copy. One year…I think it was my last semester in college, I wanted to re-read it. I absolutely could not stand it, and I recognized that it wasn’t the text, it was the edition. I couldn’t read the newer copy. So, I searched out the same edition that my mom had, and started to read that one, and it was fine. Same old book. So, in some instances I am tied to a particular edition, but not any one copy of the edition. It didn’t matter if it was my mom’s copy or the one I found…it was the same.

That is not true with some other books. They become objects. I was scanning my book shelf last night, thinking of this. Now there are some texts I couldn’t do without: The Great Gatsby, The Awakening. They are underlined and dog-eared. But for some reason, they aren’t really objects. The ones that are have something different about them…not just the underlining. Sometimes it’s the notes on the page. Sometimes it’s the history. Here’s my list:

--War Birds – Diary of an Unknown Aviator. I have never read this book, and probably never will. On the inside is written, “To Howard from Michael, 1928.” Howard and Michael were my grandfather’s older brothers. Howard would have been 16 when Michael gave him the book. He died nine years later of TB in a sanitarium, at the age of 25. There was always something romantic about that, and about the book as well.

--Faust Part 1 (Trans. By David Luke). I had to read this for a college course. Then, one night near the end of the semester, my roommates and I had a party. It was a strange day…classes had been canceled because of snow, so I started drinking at lunch. It was the last week I was going to be in college, and I had a German friend and a German roommate who were going home. We all ate tortellini and drank beer. I continued drinking the rest of the day. Then, the party. The doorbell rings, and I answer it. I knew there was this other German exchange student coming…but I had never met him. I open the door, and it was instant. “You must be Dominik.” Oh my. God knows how much we drank that night. But let’s just say that Dominik and I, by maybe 11 o'clock were sitting on the chair, holding hands and discussing Faust. We were going through the whole thing. Next to Margareta’s speech about her heart being broken or whatever, I wrote the german translation (“Meine ruh’ ist hin/Meine herz ist schwer ”…), and stuff is underlined and circled and highlighted. I did all that after that night. Suddenly, Faust meant so much more to me. I have two other translations and the German text, but it’s this one that we sat discussing that night that I could never part with.

--Kerouac by Ann Charters. This biography and I have an odd history. I graduated a semester earlier than my friends, so I went to visit them on the weekends. Mostly because Dominik (see above) was there. So, during the week I was working a professional job and on the weekends, going back to college and drinking like a fish. This book followed me throughout those few months that I was doing this. One night, I swear I went to bed (my friends had an extra room) in my pjs…everything was fine. I woke up at 5 a.m. on the bathroom floor in my underwear wrapped in a bath towel, using this book as a pillow. I have no idea how I got there. This book, along with Women of the Third Reich brought me a lot of comfort during that time, and not just as something to rest my head on.

--Bible Talks With Children, published 1889. This might seem an odd one for me to pick, and it is. It was my grandmother's, and I don’t know whose it was before her. When I was little, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house. In fact, most of my childhood memories are of being at her house playing games, watching tv, sitting on the swing, eating peanut butter sandwiches, etc. One of those memories includes reading this book at bedtime. What makes it special is that the illustrations are all wood engravings, most by Gustave Dore. I LOVE wood engravings and wood cuts…in fact, its one of my favorite forms of art. Dore, Durer, etc. FABULOUS stuff. Anyway, this book was probably the beginning of my interest in that. It’s got all the great bible stories that are appropriate for children: the murder of Abel, the expulsion of Hagar, Lot fleeing Sodom, Achan being stoned to death (one of the more memorable engravings), Death on a Pale Horse. GREAT stuff for kids to look at before they go to bed. No wonder I have so many nightmares. A lot of the engravings can be seen here. But I love it because it’s a book I associate, surprisingly in a good way, with all the time I spent with my grandparents.

The English Patient. I read this book initially because of the movie. And of course I only wanted to see the movie because Ralph Fiennes was in it. Not the type of guy 15 year olds typically dream about, but I wasn’t a typical 15 year-old. He was serious, brooding, mysterious. The English Patient was one of the first “adult” book I ever read…it marked the point of distinction between what I read as a child and what I would read as an adult. I’ve come back to it countless times since, and each time I see myself in different places in the book. When I first read it I was head over heels about someone and saw myself as Almasy…I got where he was coming from. When I was in the Dominik situation (see above), and didn’t want to admit to myself that we weren’t going to be together beyond the end of the semester (he was going back to Germany), I read it and saw us clearly as Hana and Kip. The scene at the end where Kip is back in India and has a daughter and something she does reminds him of Hana…that thought really brought me to accept the situation for what it was and move on. A few years later, I had clearly become Katherine Clifton, in a situation I don’t want to discuss here (though one that turned out much better than the one in the novel). This book has helped me through a lot of stuff. Beyond that, Ondaatje is an amazing writer, and I cannot praise this novel enough for its poetry. It’s another one that I’ve beat up, underlined, dog-eared, and otherwise made my own.

and, of course,

On the Road. I bought this book 13 years ago. It’s so beat up that I had to put packing tape all over it so the cover wouldn’t fall off. I have taken this book EVERYWHERE with me…after all, I think I’ve read it 10 times or so. The bookmark that’s in it is a candy wrapper from 12th grade (1998 probably). I got my senior pictures taken with it. It pages smell like incense because for a long time I kept all my incense on top of the book. There are notes and underlining and all the good stuff that comes with a well loved book. I don’t know where I’d be without it. Expect many more posts about Kerouac coming up...I'm working on a potentially massive project.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

I wasn't sure if I would write a review for this book or not. Then I wrote the review, and I wasn't sure I would post it. I'm not good with expressing emotions and I'm not good at dealing with accepting other people's expressions of emotions. Even hugging makes me feel uncomfortable. You know I'm comfortable with you when hugging doesn't make me squirm. This is a family issue. Whether it's because we're German or just weird or cold, I don't know. My great-grandmother (the daughter of German immigrants) didn't even believe in rocking her six children...to do so was coddling them too much. So, writing this post has been very difficult, because it is so personal...it has to be so personal. This post has turned out to be much more about me and my own experience than anything in Elizabeth McCracken's book, but hell - it's my blog and I'll write what I want :-)

Having a miscarriage was much more devastating than I could have ever imagined. I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe it here. When someone you know dies, most of the time you have memories of them...even though you miss them terribly, and wish they hadn't died, there are usually good things you can remember to help you through it. This is not so with a pregnancy loss. You are mourning for someone you didn't know. I've lost a fair amount of people in my lifetime, so I know about death...I know about mourning. When my best friend died when we were juniors in h.s. (her 28th b-day would have been this past Tuesday - 10/21...which was also the date, many years earlier, when my grandmother -now dead - gave birth to a stillborn son), I remember describing my feelings as if someone had blindfolded me and dropped me in the middle of the forest...I was completely disoriented - how did I get here? where am I? how do I find my way back to a place I know? Even if you do find your way back, it's never to a place you know. It might look the same, taste the same, smell the same, etc., but it's never the same. Having a miscarriage is no different, except there was never a "person" to mourn. Instead, you have lost someone you will never be able to get to know...someone you will never have the chance to meet. It's a mourning for hopes, dreams, expectations. That might sound trivial, like not being able to go on a trip that you had planned, but it's anything but.

In addition, it's a blow to your self-esteem...or something like that. I experienced it - am experiencing it - as a blow to my female-ness...my womanhood. Somehow, I wasn't able to sustain this life inside of me. It is a sense of failure at the one job nature has designed me to do. And there is the inescapable feeling that it was your fault. Even if there is no reason why it wasn't, even if science tells you it wasn't, you can't help but feel it was. The fact that most happen for unknown reasons - they don't start to test for why you have a miscarriage until you've had two or three - gives the whole thing a mystery, and you can't do anything except blame yourself.

Miscarriage is silent. Mine happened before almost anyone knew I was pregnant - actually, only my immediately family, a co-worker, and two friends knew. So, it happens, people send you sympathy cards, the next time they see you they ask how you are doing in a very sympathetic way, and it's over with...no one mentions it again. Everyone moves on, but it remains a very real part of the woman who experienced it. It's there all the time. Every day I think, by now I should have been 5 months pregnant. We would know by now if it was a boy or a girl. Every time you see someone pregnant, hear of someone pregnant, walk past the baby clothes, baby food aisles, diaper and toy commercials on television, Angelina Jolie...it's constantly reminding you that you are no longer pregnant. That this horrible thing has happened to you. Sometimes it feels as if the world is out to bombard you with as many reminders of your loss as possible. For example, checking the OMG site on yahoo, there were two stories about celebs being pregnant, and there is an entire subheading for "baby bumps." I should have a baby bump by now, damn it!

My response to every problem is to read a book. There are plenty of books out there "about" miscarriages...but most appear to be the typical clinical reaction...it gives you the statistics, it tells you about the stages of grieving, when you can start trying to conceive again, potential causes, etc. But I don't want any of that. I wanted to read a story - fiction or not - about somebody who had gone through this. Try searching for "miscarriage+fiction"...not very successful. So I was very "excited" when I accidentally came upon a review for An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.

I put excited in quotations because a book about this subject really isn't exciting. Elizabeth McCracken, the author, had a stillborn. Though miscarriages and stillborns - McCracken was very near to giving birth - are two different things, they are both in this general category of pregnancy loss. Hers occurred because of the umbilical chord was wrapped around the babies neck. She was living in France at the time, and was seeing a midwife who seemed very nonchalant about the pregnancy. Had she been seeing a regular doctor, had she been sent to the hospital immediately, etc., the baby (nicknamed "Pudding") could have maybe been saved. But McCracken doesn't play the blame game, or the "what if" game.

McCracken captures beautifully the emotions of this experience. How much it means to have someone say the right thing at the right moment. For me, it was the nurse in the post-op after my required operation. Then it was two of my male friends whose e-mails really surprised me. One even sent me a poem. Dominik - who once told me he hadn't read a book in years - sent me a poem. I was amazed. McCracken also knows about the friends you lose...or rather, the people you thought were friends who say the most hurtful things that you realize you're not friends any more, if you truly were in the first place. I had a situation where two weeks after the miscarriage, I got an exuberant e-mail from my friend that she was pregnant. I wrote back that I was happy for her, and explained what had just happened to me and that I was sorry that I couldn't be as happy for her as I wanted to be...or better put, as happy for her as she wanted me to be. I got a rather not-very-nice e-mail in response. I deleted it. End of friendship. This was the friend that I didn't want to tell I was pregnant because I knew she was trying and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. One of my first thoughts when I got pregnant was, "How am I going to tell her?" She was mad that I wasn't happy enough for her, regardless of my own situation. I'm sorry, I'm venting. Two months later...almost three months later and that still makes my blood boil.

This gets to something everyone needs to understand about pregnancy loss: it causes an unexplained, overwhelming jealousy and hatred for pregnant women. McCracken touches on this in her memoir. Is it irrational? Probably. But it's there and it doesn't go away very easily. An e-mail list that I belong to for women who have had miscarriages forbids people posting about pregnancy, or to do so with warnings, like spoiler alerts, so those of us who still aren't ready for it are spared the details. I have shot death rays in the direction of pregnant women since my miscarriage...including yesterday. McCracken poignantly states that whenever someone has a pregnancy loss, the world should spontaneously stop the reproduction process... I just wish that pregnant women would go away. Though it's already been three months since my miscarriage, I still cannot bear the thought of Thanksgiving, as my sister-in-law is pregnant. I will probably not go. I was due a month after her.

I loved McCracken's descriptions of wanting cards...like business cards...that you hand to people that explains what's going on. Kind of like John Singer's cards in The Heart is A Lonely Hunter. "I'm deaf and dumb but I read lips so there is no need to shout." McCracken had been obviously pregnant, and wanted to cards to explain the still birth to people who asked, so she didn't have to explain. I want these as well. But since most people didn't know I was pregnant, it wouldn't be for when people ask about our suddenly missing baby. No, mine would be for people who ask, "So, when are you having children? Have you started trying yet? Have you discussed it yet? WHEN ARE THE BABIES COMING?" Since, as I mentioned, I'm uncomfortable with not only my own emotions, but the emotions of others, to spare myself the embarrassment of their sympathy I just say, "Yeah, we've talked about it" and leave it at that. I wish I had a card that said, "I was pregnant but had a miscarriage. Please don't ask me about babies again, and please don't talk to me about pregnant people."

McCracken went on to get pregnant again and have a happy, healthy child. But she also captures the sense of innocence that is lost after a still birth (or miscarriage...it applies to both). Unless you have experienced it yourself, losing a pregnancy, while something you think about, something you avoid feta and deli meat so you don't have, is always something that happens to other people. And then it happens to you. And you spend any subsequent pregnancy worried - deathly worried - that it will happen again. I'm terrified of it happening again, and I'm not even pregnant (yet - hopefully it's a yet, and not a never). It's no longer something that happens to other people - it happens to YOU. And there are women out there who have two, three, five + miscarriages. In fact, 1/100 women have "recurrent miscarriages." Once that innocence has been stripped away, it is never the same. YOU are never the same, and not just because of the loss. It's a once bitten twice shy dilema. McCracken - like all women who have lost a pregnancy - know it's not a when with giving birth, it's an if. It's always an if.

The author also brings up a good point, which I hadn't thought about before. Surviving a pregnancy loss is like surviving a natural disaster. She discusses this in the context of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is not over it. But don't we, as country, think...ok, we're over it. Why aren't you? But they're not over it. They'll never be over it. And they have every right to not be over it, just as women who have lost a pregnancy have every right not to be over it.

I wanted to feel the full emotional impact of this book, so unlike with Sophie's Choice, I read the whole thing in one sitting. Maybe I'm masochistic in that way...I won't deny the charge. But I didn't want to putter around in it...I wanted to dive in and be fully engulfed. I couldn't stand to be submerged in it in intervals, like over lunch, or waiting to go to the store. It was all or nothing. Yes, this book made tears just stream down my face. This is not something you read without tissues nearby. But it was perfect. It perfectly captures this experience. It was perfectly written, and it was the perfect time for me to read it. This books comes much closer to "understanding pregnancy loss" than any book that only gives you the causes, and a list of the stages of grief.

Sophie's Choice

I will say this first off: I wish that I hadn't taken so long to read this novel. I wish I could have sat down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. But sometimes life gets in the way. I recognized when I was reading it that I was missing some of the emotional power of this wonderful novel because my reading was so spaced out over time.

That said, here is my reaction: Wow. This is an amazing book. It is deeply emotionally powerful...and deeply depressing. If you are not ready to be socked in the face by the reality of this novel - Auschwitz and its aftermath basically - don't read it.

There are many things in this novel that were unique to my reading experience: firstly, that it takes place in the period immediately following WWII - 1946, 1947. Other than Kerouac, I couldn't think of another novel that takes place then...or deals exclusively with that time. Secondly, the main character of the novel, Sophie, went through the horrors of Auschwitz, but wasn't Jewish. Up to this point, most of my dealings with Holocaust-related literature focus on the experience of Jews, but of course every other cross-section of humanity was there as well. Thirdly, Sophie wasn't a hero. In this respect, Sophie's story was probably closer to the story of your every day, average person living under Nazi rule. She wasn't involved in the resistance. She had opportunities to do so, but didn't. She tried everything she could to save her own life, and also the life of her son. Most people might talk about how they would have fought the Nazis...they would have been another Oscar Schindler if given the chance...they would have been brave. But the fact that there weren't more Oscar Schindlers...that while some people did what they could, there were thousands - millions - of people who did nothing. And they did nothing for the same reasons that Sophie did nothing. We might like to imagine that we would have done something, but human nature tells us that we probably won't have done anything. Is that cowardly? I don't know. It wasn't heroic, but I don't know if it was cowardly. Lastly, most books about the Holocaust are about just that...they take place in the camps, or during that time. Styron took a different path. While we could say that Sophie's Choice is about Stingo, the 22-year-old Virginian come to Brooklyn to write his first novel where he meets Nathan and Sophie and it's the story of their friendship and their tragic end, it's really about the aftermath of Auschwitz. Sophie wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Auschwitz...everything in the book is tainted with that.

And while all of that is clever, different from the standard, run-of-the-mill (if there could be such a thing) Holocaust novel, what makes this book so amazing, so emotionally hard-hitting is Styron's language. He is a beautiful writer. Some have complained that the sex scenes were stifled, that Sophie doesn't really have any redeeming qualities except that she was at Auschwitz, and that Stingo doesn't have many redeeming qualities himself. I can't really argue with any of those points. But none of that diminishes the beauty, the pervasive sadness of this story. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.

I also have a theory that parts of Water for Elephants were lifted from Sophie's Choice, either the book and/or movie... though I'm not accusing Gruen of plagiarism...it might have been subconscious. This thought first came to me when I watched the movie in August or September. There is a scene where Stingo and Sophie are in Sophie's room with a bottle of champagne. They are going to surprise Nathan with a celebration for his important discovery he made at the lab that day...the cure for cancer or whatever it is he says. So, Sophie and Stingo are fiddling around, getting this stuff ready, and Nathan arrives early. Just walking in on that scene, you might think something is up, and Nathan immediately begins to accuse Sophie of doing more than fiddling behind his back. I knew immediately that I had seen this scene somewhere before. I wracked my brain until I finally came upon it: Water for Elephants. There is a scene in that book that is exactly the same, in which Jacob and Marlena are fiddling with a bottle of champagne because they are going to surprise August after some triumph of the circus (I don't remember what exactly)...and August walks in on this and thinks there is something up and begins accusing them. IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME SCENE. And then, something else hit me later on in the movie: Nathan is a paranoid schizophrenic. And guess what - he displays exactly the same characteristics of another paranoid schizophrenic - August in Water for Elephants. In both cases it's revealed by someone else after Nathan/August goes nuts...in SC it's Nathan's brother; in WfE, it's the circus leader. Then there is the obvious structure parallel: the love triangle made up of Marlene/Sophie, August/Nathan, and the young, inexperienced newcomer, Stingo/Jacob. I of course don't know if Gruen ever saw or read Sophie's Choice, so I can't say if it was actually copied from there or not - on purpose or subconsciously, but the parallels are there. After a search around some other places on the net, I'm not the only person to have noticed these connections.

Anyway, Sophie's Choice was great. I once described Lolita as being achingly beautiful...I think that that phrase describes this novel as well. I could feel the horribly tragic longing in Stingo, and in Sophie. I know in the coming years, I will revisit it. It's just too powerful not to be drawn back to. I already miss it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

I hadn’t really been looking forward to Main Street, having read Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry a few years ago and not particularly caring for it. I’ve been puttering around with Main Street since January. It’s one of those that I would read a few chapters, put it down, then pick it up a gain a few weeks later. Though I liked it enough throughout, I was disinterested. That is until the last five or six chapters. At that point, for some reason, I came to really appreciate what Lewis was doing.

Main Street is the story of Carol Kennicott, a cosmopolitan dreamer in a small prairie town in Minnesota. Carol, who spent some time in the bigger cities of the Midwest as a librarian and progressive single woman, moved to Gopher Prairie with her husband, where he is a doctor. Carol had all these ideas that she was going to revitalize this small town, from introducing the women (and her husband) to the poetry of Swineburn and Tennyson, to tearing down all the buildings and starting over – Georgian architecture and a new fangled thing called City Planning.

City Planning: what I studied in college and what I have been employed in (in one way or another) since. Because most people who are reading this blog probably aren’t overly informed about the history of city planning (unless this is another strange coincidence, such as Robby Virus and I’s interest in space age lounge music)...I'll give some background. The time period in which the novel takes place (it was published in 1920) was really a golden age for the field. Some boring facts:

• In 1901, the McMillan Commission was formed to update and complete the original plan for Washington D.C. – which included Union Station (opened in 1907) and the gorgeous, symbolic National Mall pretty much as it exists today (at the time, there was a railroad station in the middle). Union Station was designed by Daniel Burnham, and as a planner, I am required to tell you that Burnham said the following: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." –If there really are planners reading this, they will know why that’s funny. (More on Carol & Washington D.C. later)


• In 1901, New York implemented the New York State Tenement House Law, which led to the outlaw of the “Dumbbell Tenements” – those horrible things that produced the miserable conditions of the poor immigrants to NYC in the late 19th/early 20th century, as described by Jacob Riis and others. See some photos of Riis's here...very moving.


• In 1916, the Nation’s first comprehensive zoning resolution was adopted by NYC


• In 1917, an experimental cooperative agricultural colony was established in California (farm cooperatives are mentioned in Main Street…of course it's viewed it as socialism)


• In 1917, Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. is elected the first president of the American City Planning Institute. I am a member of its descendent, the American Institute of Certified Planners.

All this stuff is going on behind the scenes and influencing Carol. It is mentioned that she is reading city planning magazines. This is a turbulent time for the things that Carol cares about: labor is organizing, women are organizing, movies are being made (Birth of a Nation is released in 1915). Freud and Jung are writing. These things aren’t discussed outright for the most part…nobody says, “Hey, did you read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire?” or “Isn’t that something about Margaret Sanger?” but it’s all there.
The first half of Main Street focuses on Carol and her struggles with the town. When she tries to implement self-improvement for the poor, including employment assistance and life skills training, she is met with resistance – that’s charity, which is the job of the churches, and those lazy bums just need to get off their asses and work for a change. When Carol suggests mending the clothes they donate to the poor, she is told that the poor have more free time and should do their own mending...why should the richest wives in town waste their time doing that? She wants new buildings that take into account design, function, neighborhood character…not the haphazard development that had been occurring. She wants to start a theater group, but people are only interested in putting on stupid stuff…nothing high art that would add culture to the town.
I completely empathize with the early struggles of Carol Kennicott. She is my imaginary professional forerunner. The struggles that she has to get her reforms implemented (which never happens) – even to have them taken seriously – are struggles that I have today. “Why would we install sidewalks in this nice new townhouse development for the elderly, a block away from the grocery store? People don’t need sidewalks.” Instead they walk in the street and get run over by cars going 50 mph in a 25 mph speed zone. Ah, the countless hours I have spent trying to get municipal officials to see that zoning isn’t communism (or a way to bend the rules for your buddies while at the same time punish the newcomers), for example, or that it isn’t really a good idea to build in the floodplain. It makes me realize how much some types of people never change.
Carol oscillates between being the victim of Main Street, and kind of being an asshole. Sometimes she wants to accept Gopher Prairie for what it is, and sometimes she wants to tear it all down and start over. But I think that that was part of what made Carol come to life…she has dimensions…her feelings changed.
The second half of the book begins to focus in on the disintegrating relationship between Carol and her husband Will. Will wins Carol over in the beginning, and sells her on the idea of Gopher Prairie…charming, bucolic, pastoral, etc…and to be fair to Carol, he does say that he’ll take her there and they’ll turn the town into what it should be…into what the dreamers always wanted it to be. But when they get there, reality strikes. It takes Carol a half-hour to walk the entire area of the town, with “the grasping prairie on every side."It’s full of drab houses, gossipy women (and men), etc., and in many ways, Carol is laughed at. ("She wants to help the poor! Hahaha! Who ever thought of such a thing.") It doesn't help that he pretty much says it's all ugly and insinuates that the inhabitants are all uncultured, stupid lugs. It was probably true, though.
To be fair to the other inhabitants of Main Street, including Will, Carol is kind of pompous and pretentious sometimes. She comes in from St. Paul with the attitude of “I know what high art is…I’ve lived in the big city. I’ll teach you all about it.” The residents of Gopher Prairie want none of this. They’re happy with the way things are. They think Gopher Prairie is the best place in the world and are perfectly pleased with their own version of “culture.” This struggle is presented at the micro-level in the relationship between Carol and Will. Will, who really is a sweetheart for the most part (until he starts messing around with Maud Dyer), at first tolerates Carol’s opinions and efforts. He just sort of let her do her own thing. But over time, he comes to resent her and her desire to change things, including himself…and she comes to resent him in turn as well. He, and the rest of the town, don’t understand why Carol can’t just be satisfied. At one point, Will tells her, “That’s the whole trouble with you. You haven’t got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers wives, then you wouldn’t be so discontented.”
But that’s not fair to Carol. I think that neither Will nor Carol knew what they were getting into when they married each other…they both seemed to have different ideas of who they were marrying. Carol, like many wives of her time, and for ages before and after, wanted to live what she called a more conscious life. She didn’t want to be satisfied with just more work. She wanted something more…something more than Gopher Prairie. If Will had been more understanding of where Carol was coming from, I don’t think it would have been so bad for her. But for the most part, she was all alone. Yes she was difficult, and pretentious and pompous, as I already said, but she did have a point. She was an idealist, but didn’t have the skills needed to get her ideals realized.
What Lewis does, however, is that he doesn’t really sympathize with Carol…he presents her as she is, and how she thinks that she is, but does the same for Will. What he wanted in a wife wasn’t what he got. Maybe that was his fault – I think that to a large extent it was. But Lewis shows both sides.
Anyway, Will’s indictment of his wife, along with some other factors, is the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back. Carol decides she’s had enough of Gopher Prairie, and decides to move with their young son to Washington D.C. – without Will. I was shocked by this. I was shocked not only by Carol’s courage to go off on her own – to live, with her son, in a city she never saw before. We’re talking 1917 or 1918 here. But I was also shocked that Lewis, a man obviously, was able to create such an amazing female character. She wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t “immoral” (by the standard of the times), like her somewhat-contemporary, Carrie from Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. She didn’t go to Washington to live the single life or anything like that. She went to assert her own freedom and independence.
I think that Lewis’s choice of Washington D.C. is an interesting one, and I wonder why he chose, or had Carol choose that over the more obvious NYC or Chicago. It allowed him to have her working for the war effort, but other than that, I am struck by the coincidence that Washington was the site of so many changes at the time, including planning-related. He gives no detail. But like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Washington during the early 20th century was a magnet for planners. It might be a surprise to some that the National Mall didn’t always exist as it does today. Pierre L’Enfant designed it in that way, or in a similar way, but it didn’t get implemented on a grand scale until the early 1900s. When Carol was there, the Lincoln Memorial was just being built (it was finished in 1922), and there was a railroad station in the middle of the Mall.

Union Station was pretty new…maybe about a decade old. I just find it really intriguing that Lewis decided to plop Carol down in the middle of this…the center of the free world, so to speak, instead of the more obvious choices. I think that it underscores what I was saying at the beginning…that all these important things are going on around Carol and having an influence on her. Lewis puts her right in the middle of the action.
In Washington, Carol works in an office, meets a lot of interesting women – and men also – but mostly women. Suffragettes among them. She meets the type of women Carol would have been if she hadn’t gone to Gopher Prairie with Will. She has a good time.
And I have to give props to Will here too, who let her go. Maybe he was trying to avoid a scandal by seeming to bless her leaving, but he does so nonetheless. He came to visit, and tried in his own way to sell her on Gopher Prairie (- Carol notices that he’s trying in the same way that he convinced her about GP in the first place). But he says that he didn’t come to bring her back, and he doesn’t. She ends up staying in Washington for a year and a half. In the end, she decides to return to Minnesota. Not, surprisingly, because she’s pregnant again. Not because it’s time to go home and be the happy wife Will always wanted. But because her active hate for the town had subsided. She needed to get away long enough to be able to appreciate it for what it was. She remarks when she returns that people care about her…they greet her when they see she has come home…they are interested (to an extent) in her travels, etc. And she realizes that it would never be like that in Washington. She has come to appreciate Gopher Prairie for what it is…she can accept the people and the town, but she can now do so without stifling herself…without giving up herself. She can finally call Gopher Prairie home.

Sinclair Lewis was kind of an interesting chap. One drunken evening Lewis declared himself, “the best goddam writer in this here goddam country.” He wrote about the America that he knew…and it wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of slack for that. But Lewis didn’t see himself in that narrow way…that he was putting down America by writing his satires…his stories that show the black eyes and warts, in addition to the idealism and passion. He considered himself a fanatic American…desiring to push us to realize our potential. Main Street caused a sensation because of his true-to-life depiction of small towns…and most people don’t like to see true-to-life depictions of themselves. The critic Ludwig Lewisohn wrote that “Perhaps no novel since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had struck so deep over so wide a surface of the national life.” It caused a mini-sensation. His obit in Time said he “he hit the U.S. hard in its solar plexus, immortalized a national character.” I imagine they didn’t think he immortalized it in a good way.

Here is Lewis’s career in a nutshell: He writes five “forgettable and forgotten” novels. Then he writes Main Street. H.L. Mencken wrote of it, “That idiot has written a masterpiece.” Then Lewis wrote four other best sellers, each worse than the previous one. Then he wrote more forgettable and forgotten stuff. Summary: his “productivity clearly outlasted his talent.”

Despite a number of semi-important novels, he has been consistently dismissed by the literary community. Rebecca West, E.M. Forster and Mecklen were all supporters, but almost everyone else thought he was a hack. Then, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature– the first American to do so. At the time, Lewisohn wrote, “something very like a groan went up” about it. They felt that Lewis only won the prize because he didn’t portray America as this shining example in the world. He showed it as it really was (or is). People felt that this fed into the European stereotype of America as vulgar, materialistic, and hypocritical. You know, what Europe still thinks of us. Hemingway said the only good thing about Lewis getting the Prize was that it meant that Theodore Dreiser didn’t, though I doubt that had anything to do with Hemingway believing that Lewis unfairly portrayed the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Lewis addressed the comments of his detractors when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1930. He said, “In America most of us are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American…To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias…that, in fine, America has gone through the revolutionary change from rustic colony to world empire without having in the least altered the bucolic and Puritanic simplicity of Uncle Sam.” Again, this strikes of the patriotism test going on today in American politics.

More funny Lewis and Nobel Prize anecdotes: when Lewis got the phone call that he had won, he thought it was a joke. When he was finally convinced that it wasn’t, he called his wife to tell her. "What's the matter?" "Dorothy, I've got the Nobel prize!" "Oh, have you ... How nice for you! Well, I have the Order of the Garter!"

I think that I mentioned this when I was posting about Willa Cather, but I am amazed to look at the time period here and compare what Lewis is writing about, what Cather is writing about, and what is going on with other American writers, particularly those hanging out in Paris. This is the time when Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway are writing as well. It’s amazing to look at these two groups of authors and see how different they were. It’s like they were writing about completely different worlds…Lewis, Cather and others telling the story of the American heartland…pioneer stories, with the ex-pats giving us something different entirely. Fitzgerald was an early admirer of Lewis…he even wrote him a fan letter. Many would probably argue that those based in Paris at the time were probably better writers. Obviously Main Street doesn’t hold a candle to The Great Gatsby, which I think is the best American book of the 20th century, but Lewis’s first wife Grace brings up a very good point about the Fitzgerald and his fellow writers: “Were the 1920s really the Jazz Age except for a few? Most Americans at that time lived more like Sinclair Lewis’s characters.” Lewis exists in a place between the Victorians and the Moderns…between the world of writers such as Edith Wharton and her friend Henry James and the world of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and those to come after.

But Lewis didn’t feel animosity towards them…I think he recognized his place as a transitory spot between these two literary worlds. “I have, for the future of American literature, every hope and every eager belief. We are coming out, I believe, of the stuffiness of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism. There are young Americans today who are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them.” He goes on to mention Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, and William Faulkner, and says of them all (this is great), “Most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull. I salute them, with a joy in being not yet too far removed from their determination to give to the America that has mountains and endless prairies, enormous cities and lost far cabins, billions of money and tons of faith, to an America that is as strange as Russia and as complex as China, a literature worthy of her vastness.”

Time, in Lewis’s obituary, wrote that he “was not a great writer, nor even a good one.” The whole obit is a horrendously mean (IMO) stab at a decent American writer. His official biographer wrote that “he was one of the worst writers in modern American literature.” Ouch. As I said in the beginning, I was disappointed in Elmer Gantry a few years ago, and I feared that Main Street would be a mix of that and Winesburg, Ohio, which bored me to death. In reality, it turned out much more like The Magnificent Ambersons, another great but pretty much forgotten classic of yesteryear. Main Street was completely different than I expected. I appreciated it…I appreciated Carol and the voice that Lewis gave to his female character at a time when male authors didn’t bother much with females…especially ones like Carol. It’s not a perfect book…it’s not the best book ever written…not by a long shot. But I liked it, and I will pay it a complement I haven’t been paying many novels on the Modern Library’s Top 100 of the 20th Century lately…I understand why it’s on the list, and I agree.

I Survived Ulysses and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Ah, what to say about Ulysses...

Since I can't come up with anything immediately, I'll let some important people have their say first:

"It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & though can make a work of art without the cook's intervening...the same applies to Eliot." - Edith Wharton

"Never did I read such tosh. As for the first two chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th - merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges" - Virginia Woolf. She also wrote that Ulysses was "an illiterate, underbred book ... the book of a self taught working man." She later admitted that despite that, it is clearly important.

"He's is a good writer...People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him" - Gertrude Stein, who did not have any love for Joyce. As Hemingway says in A Moveable Feast, if you mentioned his name twice at her house, you would not be invited back.


"A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope—such is Joyce's work." - Karl Radek. I don't know who he is, but I like what he said.

"Few other people have been interested in this book, where the reader, cutting through a boundless forest of words, would find nothing but worthless trifles and erratic images. Who but persons with an excess of fat would need such a book?" - Zhou Libo - I don't know who he is either...but in VH1-reality-show-train-wreck fashion, he roundabout-ly calls anyone who likes Ulysses fat. Yeah - take that!

Ok, ok...there were a lot people that said good things about it too, like Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Carl Jung (though he became convinced that Joyce was schizophrenic after reading it), etc. There was this one guy named More who didn't like Ulysses. He was asked if he had read T.S. Eliot's defense of it. More said that he hadn't. When told that Eliot argued that Ulysses is a work of the highest importance, he responded: "That young man has a screw loose somewhere!" Even Joyce's wife called his writing "chop suey" and asked why he didn't write "sensible books that people can understand."

Here's the plot of Ulysses: Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom wander around Dublin, first separately, then together, on June 16, 1904. Yup - the greatest novel of the 20th century (my ass), almost 800 pages - and that's it. Ok, moving on...

Seriously, though, I could write here about what I didn't like about Ulysses, but most people who have read this novel have already done that for me. But to summarize: dense, confusing, obtuse, WTF?, cannot comprehend, must be too stupid, etc. etc. I don't feel there is any sense rehashing any of it. Probably even those of you who haven't read it know what I'm talking about.

Looking at Joyce the man and the history of Ulysses is (to me) much more interesting than discussing the bad points of the novel. Joyce was afraid of dogs and thunderstorms. He began Ulysses in 1914, 2 years after his last (and final) visit to Ireland...he created the whole thing from memory and by consulting with friends and directories. While Joyce was a teacher in Italy, one of his students was Italo Svevo, who would go on to write Zeno's Conscience. It is Ezra Pound who should be thanked (or stoned) for the publication of Ulysses. Joyce set Ulysses on 6/16/1904 to commemorate his first date with his wife, Norah. I've considered this a lot over the three months it took me to read this book...would I want someone to write a book like Ulysses to commemorate their first date with me (that turns out to be the "Greatest novel of the 20th century" even though nobody knows what the hell it means)? Or would I rather have some nice jewelry? I'm not really sure. I suppose if said book rakes in a lot of money, I could buy a lot more jewelry...but I digress...

But what is really interesting to me is the obscenity thing. My understanding of the situation: the novel was serialized in an American magazine. After the publication of a certain chapter, it was banned for obscenity. A few years later, with dollar signs in their eyes, Random House decided it wanted to publish Ulysses in America. So, they essentially staged the obscenity trial. They wanted it to go before a certain judge in NY, because they knew he would rule in favor of it. They also wanted to include the opinions of respected artists and writers about Ulysses...problem was, at that time you could only use what was in the book for evidence. So, they sent a guy to Europe to buy the book, paste the articles in it they wanted to include for evidence, and return to America. The day his ship arrived was blazing hot, and customs was letting everyone through, no questions asked. The guy with the book insisted that they open his luggage, and then insisted that it be seized. They got the judge they wanted, and he of course said it wasn't obscene because nowhere in it was the "leer of the sensualist" present...Joyce didn't include his rude schoolboy pornography (as per Wharton) to titillate, but to simply tell the story of what someone does in the course of a day.

Joyce has said that he wanted "the ideal reader with the ideal insomnia," and that his readers should "devote his whole life to reading [his] works." Well, I have insomnia sometimes, but I have come to terms with the fact that I'm not cut out to be Joyce's ideal reader. I can't/won't even devote my life to Kerouac's writing...and I cannot imagine doing so for anyone else - especially not if it included Ulysses. (Though I might be forced to take Joyce over Henry James.)

The jury is still out for me on my overall, final opinion on Ulysses. After finishing Don Quixote (the last BIG GREAT book I read) last year, I was ambivalent as well...a few months later I "got it." But there was a difference: I didn't have to force myself through DQ. Yeah, I get that Ulysses is important, if for nothing else it's ambition. Clearly Joyce was a very talented writer to be able to pull off something here...even if I'm not sure what it is that he pulled off. There were funny parts. There were lewd parts. There were even parts where I understood what was happening. But I could say that about a lot of books.

I have a theory that you have to be Irish to appreciate Ulysses. Kind of like I really like Faust, sauerkraut, efficiency, and German beer because I'm German. Despite what my husband's last name (a McL-), and consequently mine, might lead you to believe, I'm German to the core - old, Protestant farmer German on pretty much every known branch. The obvious solution to this might be to have my husband read it and see if he likes it. But Shawn wouldn't get it either, though - I suspect his ancestors were Ulster Scots (aka Scotch-Irish)...not "Irish." (But don't remind him of that! He prefers green to tartan if you know what I mean.) If it's not an Irish thing, it must be what I have long suspected: that nobody really gets it...people just go on about how great it is because they didn't get it, so they are either stupid or it's a great book, so they choose the lesser of the evil. Or maybe I'm just too stupid to get it, so in order to still feel half-intelligent, I assume that everyone who says they like it must be pretending to get it...because these people can't be smarter than me. Maybe Joyce has played a grand joke on all of us for the last 90 years or so. After all, he did say, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." I don't know what to think. But then again, that's generally how Ulysses made me feel...confused.

It was a good feeling to be able to put that book back on my shelf. It went on the shelf instead of in the abandoned books pile because maybe someday, someone will walk into my 'library' and I can point at Ulysses and say, I read that, and that person will be impressed. I'm afraid, however, of its status there...I'm afraid that one day I might pick it up and think, "Maybe I'll try it again... they say the more you read it..." Listen, Readers of Kristin's Blog: I am holding you responsible. If I ever write on this blog, "I am going to read Ulysses again," please stop me.

Ulysses is important: for its influence, for its ambition, for setting the bar so high on what you can do in a novel. I will conceded that. Joyce is obviously talented...maybe a genius. But I didn't get it. Don't expect me to say this type of thing again: if you understand Ulysses, you're smarter than I am.

For (another) great review of Ulysses please check out Doug Shaw's page.