Archives for May 2008

“Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
E.M. Forster, “Anonymity: An Enquiry”

I’ve been thinking a lot about character names lately and admiring other writer’s choices and inventions. For example, in Mark’s novel, Harry, Revised, the main character is named Harry Rent, and it’s such a good name — simple, but suggestive of grief (i.e., the rending that follows a death, which fits as Harry’s a widower) as well as of the provisional, semi-permanent state (i.e., renting, not owning) that sets off Harry’s “revision” process.
Then there’s the less subtle, still marvelous class of character names: Uriah Heep, Augustus Gloop, Undine Sprague (possibly my favorite ever), Fevvers, Stephen Dedalus, the fragile Glass family, and so on.
So, I was amused to come across this letter today in The Notebooks of Henry James. It was written in response to a reader of The Liar with a personal interest in James’s use of “Capadose” for a character name:

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
13 Oct. 1896.
My dear Sir,
You may be very sure that if I had ever had the pleasure of meeting a person of your striking name I wouldn’t have used the name, especially for the purpose of the tale you allude to.
It was exactly because I had no personal or private associations with it that I felt free to do so. But I am afraid that (in answer to your amiable inquiry) it is late in the day for me to tell you how I came by it.
The Liar was written (originally published in The Century Magazine) 10 years ago–and I simply don’t remember.
Fiction-mongers collect proper names, surnames, &c.–make notes and lists of any odd or unusual, as handsome or ugly ones they see or hear–in newspapers (columns of births, deaths, marriages, &c.) or in directories and signs of shops or elsewhere; fishing out of these memoranda in time of need the one that strikes them as good for a particular case.
“Capadose” must be in one of my old note-books. I have a dim recollection of having found it originally in the first column of The Times, where I find almost all the names I store up for my puppets. It was picturesque and rare and so I took possession of it. I wish–if you care at all–that I had applied it to a more exemplary individual! But my romancing Colonel was a charming man, in spite of his little weakness.
I congratulate you on your bearing a name that is at once particularly individualizing and not ungraceful (as so many rare names are).
I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly
Henry James

I also like how you could set this letter to “This Is Just To Say“: I have named a character with your surname … Forgive me, it was too tempting: so picturesque, so rare.” (Commas, &c. added to make it suitably Jamesian.)

“If any one asks me for good advice, I say I will give it, but only on condition that you promise me not to take it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from journalist David Samuels, who has two new books out from New Press: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which collects a decade’s worth of reportage and essays for Harper’s and The New Yorker, and The Runner, an expansion of Samuels’s well-known New Yorker article on James Hogue, the 28-year-old drifter who conned his way into Princeton.
In a favorable review of Only Love Can Break Your Heart that ran in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the reviewer noted how Samuels’s journalism, which is populated with portraits of the self-deluded, the washed-up, and con artists, is “a tribute to the twin American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit.” Fitting then that what Samuels chose to contribute here is his top five books featuring double agents.
1. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad’s answer to Crime and Punishment is a sophisticated portrait of the psychological blankness and lack of any settled sense of self that are essential ingredients for at least one major character in every decent modern spy novel. Narrated by an old Conrad-like Englishman living in Switzerland, the novel tells the story of a Russian university student named Razumov who betrays the confidence of the revolutionary terrorist Victor Haldin only to fall in love with Victor’s sister, Natalie. The story of Razumov’s serial betrayals and the final disappointment of his hopes for redemption and forgiveness are opens up the cold landscape of betrayal that generations of brilliant spy novelists like Eric Ambler, John Le Carre, Charles McCarry and Alan Furst would populate with betrayers and seducers whose job was to teach readers the cruel lessons of the 20th century, etc.. A much better novel than The Secret Agent.
2. Out of the Night by Jan Valtin. Jan Valtin’s account of his life as an agent of the Communist International — the Comintern — working to destroy the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s is one of the most horrifying and illuminating political memoirs of the 20th century. The communist decision to form a strategic alliance with Hitler proves to be one of the most deluded and disastrous political miscalculations of modern history. Valtin is captured, then tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo for three years before he offers to become a Nazi agent in the hopes of saving his dedicated and long-suffering wife Firelei and their young son. Secretly remaining under communist discipline, Valtin finds himself caught between the horrors of the Stalinist purges and dank Nazi torture chambers. He eventually immigrates to America, though it is hard to say that this book — a huge bestseller when published in 1941, and almost entirely forgotten today — ends well. A good primer on 20th century Europe, and how political ideologies eat the brains of their adherents.
3. Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow. Famous as a friend and sometime musical collaborator of the brilliant and canny jazz originator Louis Armstrong in the 1920s and 1930s, Mezz Mezzrow was equally famous in jazz circles for selling some of the best marijuana on the East Coast. His autobiography tells the story of the birth of jazz as American popular music with a fan’s love and a musician’s insight. Mezzrow’s hipster vibe is balanced by his personal modesty and his unbounded admiration for Armstrong’s genius. Mezzrow eventually came to believe that his deep love for black music and his years of sharing the Negro condition had actually transformed him from a dark-skinned, curly haired Detroit Jew into a black man, a form of personal rebirth that was formally certified by the New York State prison system when Mezzrow was incarcerated as a Negro, making him the first official White Negro, Wigger, or what have you.
4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré. John Le Carré, now an ill-tempered author of crappy thrillers, once wrote cold, witty, mean-spirited books with a painterly feel for the shades of gray inhabited by the middle-aged men who fought the battles of the Cold War. While Graham Greene may be hopelessly overrated, Le Carré is a great 20th century novelist whose four or five best books about the shadowy intelligence and counter-intelligence wars of the Cold War are sure bets to be read fifty or a hundred years from now for subtle psychological portraiture and for pure entertainment. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is Le Carré’s thoroughly depressing version of the Philby-Burgess-MacClean spy scandal that exposed the rottenness of the British ruling class. Wives betray their husbands, pudgy men read old documents in ill-heated rooms, idealism dissipates into the disappointments of late middle age, and hate and spite reign superior to generosity and love. The BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness is nearly as good as the book; the BBC version of LeCarre’s sequel, Smiley’s People, is even better.
5. Libra by Don DeLillo. The displaced, cocky, abusive idealist who makes defining choices only to end up as a pawn in someone else’s game is Don DiLillo’s greatest fictional character (the character named Jack Ruby in this novel might rank fourth or fifth). Like many other DeLillo’s novels, Libra is both a po-mo book about storytelling and a brilliant rendering of life on the fringes of American mass society. What makes this novel special is DeLillo’s ability to concentrate for so long and at such a high poetic pitch on the contradictions of Oswald’s character until he breaks free from the mass of conspiracy theories and counter-conspiracy theories to become a flesh and blood character in DeLillo’s own novel. DeLillo may be a poor heir to the mantle of Pynchon and Gaddis but he does have the makings of a truly great modern spy novelist. I would like to suggest that Mr. DeLillo read Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games by former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent “Pete” Bagley, and get to work on a double agent novel about the fake KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. I’d love to read it.

I came home from Washington, D.C., yesterday afternoon to find an e-mail from Paul Moravec. It contained a Sibelius sound file and the following message: “La commedia è finita…for now!” The play is over is, of course, the last line of Pagliacci, and the file Paul sent me contained the last scene of The Letter.
Paul has been sending me hot-off-the-press chunks of this scene for the past couple of weeks, and I expected it to be wrapped up by the time I got back from Washington. Even so, I got goosebumps when I saw the title of his e-mail, and much bigger ones as I listened for the first time to the shockingly intense music to which he set the concluding pages of my libretto. I immediately called him in Princeton and left a message: “I just listened to it. Wow, wow, wow, wow, WOW!” As soon as I hung up, I called Mrs. T in Connecticut to tell her that The Letter was finished. Then I took a deep breath and listened to the last five pages of the score three times in a row.
Needless to say, The Letter isn’t anywhere near finished. Paul and I still have to grapple with a long list of as-yet-unfixed fixes that we drew up after the workshop performances that took place two months ago. Once they’re done, we’ll send the vocal score off to the Santa Fe Opera. At the end of July, we’re both planning to spend a week in Santa Fe looking at this year’s productions, one of which will be staged by Jonathan Kent, who’ll be directing The Letter. We’re thinking that we may want to make a few more changes to the score and libretto once we’ve seen what Jonathan does with The Marriage of Figaro. Somewhere along the way, Paul will compose the orchestral interludes that separate the eight scenes of The Letter. Then, toward the end of the summer, we’ll send in the final revised version of the vocal score, which will be distributed to the members of the cast. At that point Paul will start orchestrating the opera, and I’ll put The Letter aside until next summer, when it goes into rehearsal in Santa Fe.
We’re not done, not by a long shot…and yet it feels as though we are. I started drafting the libretto in November of 2006, and Paul started writing the music last May. Ever since then we’ve been in constant touch, and though both of us have had many other things on our plates, The Letter has never been far from our minds. Now we can catch our breath–briefly.
How does it feel to have reached this point in the making of an opera? I can’t speak for Paul, but I feel more or less the way Nuke LaLoosh felt at the end of this scene in Bull Durham:
INT. THE DUGOUT
NUKE PUTS ON HIS WARMUP JACKET and sits down next to Crash Davis, who’s taking off his gear, readying to hit.
NUKE I was great, eh?
CRASH Your fastball was up and your curveball was hanging–in the Show they woulda ripped you.
NUKE Can’t you let me enjoy the moment?
CRASH The moment’s over.
Again, I don’t know about Paul, but I didn’t break open any Dom Perignon last night. Better than anyone, we know how much work we have left to do between now and July 25, 2009, and none of it is going to be easy. So yes, the moment’s over–but as long as I live, I’ll never forget how it felt to open that e-mail and listen for the first time to the last five pages of The Letter. You don’t get many moments like that in a lifetime.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Winston Churchill, speech, Nov. 10, 1942

I belong to the first generation of biographers whose work was shaped by the invention of the personal computer. Not only did I write The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken on a computer, but I bought my first laptop in order to transcribe material from the Mencken Collection, which is housed in Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. So far as I know, I was the first person ever to bring a laptop into the Mencken Room, whose contents include, among other fascinating things, the ancient Corona portable typewriter on which Mencken banged out most of his books and other published writings. I like to think that he would have appreciated this fact, but I wouldn’t bet on it. “The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car,” he told an interviewer in 1946. He didn’t even care for the telephone, and I have no doubt that he would have cast a cold eye on cellphones.

I finished writing The Skeptic on September 4, 2001, a week before 9/11. Blogging was uncommon then, and the Internet, though no longer in its infancy, was still in the process of evolving into the supple and protean research tool it has since become. I did almost no Web-based research on The Skeptic. Google existed in 2001, but I’d only just heard of it. Most of my work, as I explained in an online interview conducted in 2002, was done in the Mencken Room:

I spent the better part of five years sifting through the Mencken Collection at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, to which Mencken left most of his private papers–manuscripts, scrapbooks, cancelled checks, even one of the ancient portable typewriters he carted around to the presidential conventions he covered for the Baltimore Sun. It’s housed in a wonderful old room that looks like the library of a shabby but distinguished men’s club, and the walls are lined with books from Mencken’s personal library, many of them inscribed to him by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser. To sit in that room day after day, reading and writing about Mencken, was an extraordinary experience–sometimes I felt as though he were looking over my shoulder–and I also got a kick out of showing the collection to friends who happened to be passing through Baltimore.

All this was great fun, but it was also hugely time-consuming, so much so that I ended up renting a studio apartment in Baltimore, where I spent many three-day weekends during the five years it took me to research The Skeptic. I could have done some of my work in New York, but I found it easier to shuttle at will between the Mencken Room and the stacks of the Pratt Library, running downstairs at regular intervals to flip through dusty copies of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature or spool through a reel of microfilm. (Remember microfilm?)

Everything had changed by the time I got going on Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong four years ago. While I put in a fair amount of time at the Armstrong Archives in Queens and the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, I did much of my research on Rhythm Man seated at my desk in Manhattan, using my iBook to access the archives of the New York Times, The New Yorker, Time magazine and many other publications on line and on CD-ROM. Between them, Google Book Search and Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature also made it possible for me to look through more than half of the books I consulted without going to a library. I even “visited” Armstrong’s grave from the comfort of my office.

Needless to say, there is no substitute for on-the-spot research. As I wrote two years ago: “To be sure, microfilm and its successor technologies are (mostly) unmixed blessings, but any scholar can tell you that there’s no substitute, emotionally speaking, for handling the thing itself, be it a scrapbook or a holograph manuscript. Though constant use has drained the word awesome of much of its meaning, I don’t know any other way to describe what it feels like to turn the crumbling pages of the personal scrapbooks of the greatest of all jazz musicians.” And while I suppose I could have written the following paragraph from Rhythm Man without first visiting Armstrong’s home in Queens, it wouldn’t have been the same had I settled for taking a virtual tour of the house and grounds:

[Armstrong’s] home, located seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens…is a modest three-story brick-covered frame house whose interior is reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the house looks like what it is: the residence of a poor boy who grew up and made good. Unlike Graceland, though, Armstrong’s house is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As you stand in the smallish study, whose decorations include a portrait of the artist painted by Tony Bennett, it is impossible not to be touched by the aspiration visible wherever you look. This, it is clear, was the home of a working man, bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but what he did. “I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don’t have I don’t need,” he wrote. “My home with Lucille is good, but you don’t see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain’t gonna play your horn for you.”

But I’m also well aware that without making extensive use of Web-based research, I couldn’t have written Rhythm Man while simultaneously serving as The Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic. I simply wouldn’t have had the time. And Web-based research is more than merely a time-saving tool: it allows the biographer to act instantaneously on serendipitous flashes of inspiration. The night before I finished writing the last chapter of Rhythm Man, I found myself wondering whether Jerry Herman had ever said anything in print about Armstrong’s recording of “Hello, Dolly!” A few keystrokes later I found out that he had, and that it was both significant and revealing. I immediately transcribed the quotation and incorporated it into the manuscript that I e-mailed to Harcourt three days later.

Still, it is the time-saving aspect of Web-based research that I suspect most biographers will regard as crucial to their professional lives. It took me ten years to write my Mencken book. That’s a big chunk out of the life of a middle-aged man, big enough to make him think twice about going back to the well a second time. When I finished The Skeptic, I was sure that I’d never write another primary-source biography. But I did, and it took me just four years to write. That’s a lot more manageable, even for a busy drama critic and part-time opera librettist.

So what next? Another biography? A second opera? Or something completely different? I haven’t a clue. Now that the Web has cut out so much of the hitherto-inescapable waste motion of a biographer’s life, it would seem a shame for me not to build on the things I’ve learned in the process of writing Rhythm Man. But I don’t yet have a subject in mind, nor do I know what I want to do with the rest of my life, other than enjoy it.

What I do know is that I don’t intend to spend it sitting around idly–I’m not made that way–and experience has taught me that I’m rarely content to be doing only one thing at a time. Henry James said it: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular as long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” I’ve had a lot, probably more than most people, in the seven crowded years that have whizzed by since I finished writing The Skeptic. Do I really want to spend four of the years that remain to me writing yet another primary-source biography? We’ll see.

“There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”
Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott