There are Booker Prize winners and there are Booker Prize winners. I still vaguely rue the day that I read online about the 2003 prize going to D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little and stopped at the bookstore on the way home from work to impulsively buy it–in hardcover, no less. A few pages were enough to relegate it to the sell pile.
What a different world is the 2009 winner, Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel’s thrilling novel of the Tudor court has been praised to the skies everywhere, so it’s not news that I’m spellbound near the halfway point. Yet the novel defies being rushed through, so I’ve been pacing myself, even starting and finishing other novels along the way (specifically, Zoë Heller’s The Believers and lately Notes on a Scandal, about which more another time). I pick up Wolf Hall when I’m feeling focused, receptive, and equal to its plenitude.
Like a Renaissance court painter, Mantel saves some of her best effects for depicting cloth–its color, texture, even the way it smells. In this middle-of-the-night scene, she describes King Henry VIII’s robe:

Henry slowly smiles. From the dream, from the night, from the night of shrouded terrors, from maggots and worms, he seems to uncurl, and stretch himself. He stands up. His face shines. The fire stripes his robe with light, and in its deep folds flicker ocher and fawn, colors of earth, of clay.

The fabric is fine, but still the stuff of Henry’s nightmares. Later in the same scene, the book’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is leaving the king. He thinks of his late friend and patron Cardinal Wolsey, exiled by Henry earlier in the novel and eventually arrested, and the fate of the cardinal’s vestments. The memory speaks to him of air, not earth like Henry’s garment.

He thinks back to the day York Place was wrecked. He and George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the cardinal’s vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they were repacked and nailed into their traveling chests, the king’s men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each folded, by an expert touch, into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the linen bands; here, let me, George Cavendish said. Freed, the cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth’s wing. When the lids of the vestments chests were raised there was the smell of cedar and spices, somber, distant, desert-dry. But the floating angels had been packed away in lavender; London rain washed against the glass, and the scent of summer flooded the dim afternoon.

When they were first seized, early in the novel, the garments didn’t seem so evanescent–they had a substance, structure, and authority that have fled in Cromwell’s memory of them.

They bring out the cardinal’s vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemize it, and having reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their traveling crates. Cavendish flinches: “For God’s sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?”

Tapestries, as distinct from paintings, receive a similar emphasis in the novel. More about that next week.

A few literary timbits, er, tidbits. My mind is in the bakery.
• Cheeni Rao, a hugely talented young writer, published his first book last year. The book, In Hanuman’s Hands, is a painfully honest, gorgeously written memoir of addiction and recovery, but not like any you’ve ever read. Rao’s spiraling and redemption are intertwined with family mythology about his Hindu ancestors and tales from the Indian epic poem The Ramayana. The book was well received and marked Rao as a writer to watch.
Earlier this year, Rao contributed to the undergraduate alumni magazine I edit at the University of Chicago (his alma mater). His essay, “Stern Lessons,” is about going back to college after the events of In Hanuman’s Hands, finding his path as a writer, and losing a lot more. It’s a wonderful piece of writing, honest and incisive. Read “Stern Lessons” here.
• Here’s an idea I can get behind: for National Poetry Month, why not memorize a poem? I wrote previously about the rewards of learning poems by heart here. I’ll let you know mine as soon as I choose it.
• What are your reading skeletons–as distinguished from your guilty pleasures? I devoured everything written by Lee Child during the second half of last year though, honestly, I’m not sure how ashamed I am or should be. Unlike, say, some of the television I watch, I feel as though I can justify reading any book that keeps my attention. What about you, esteemed co-bloggers?

Last week I revisited Jacques Tourneur’s classic noir Out of the Past for the first time in 15 years, and I’ve had Mitchum on my mind ever since. I mean since 1995, of course. It’s an easy state to attain and a hard one to shake. (Just ask Mitchum’s first fan club: the Droolettes, dignity be damned.)
This time around, however, I found just as much of my attention fixed on Kirk Douglas’s nice turn as the elegant hood Whit Sterling. In his Mitchum biography Baby, I Don’t Care (yes, it is the best book title ever), Lee Server recounts a story from the set via Jane Greer. This, I find, accounts for quite a bit of the deliciousness of both performances.

The two got along well enough off the set, but the rivalry would flare as soon as the camera began to turn. Since Tourneur was not about to accept any obvious histrionics in his diminuendo world, Douglas was left to try and out-underact Mitchum, an exercise in futility, he discovered. He tried adding distracting bits of business during Mitchum’s lines and came up with a coin trick, running it quickly between the tops of his fingers. Bob started staring at the fingers until Kirk started staring at the fingers and dropped the coin on the rug. He put the coin away. In another scene, Douglas brought a gold watch fob out of his coat pocket and twirled it around like a propeller. This time everybody stared.

“It was a hoot to watch them going at it,” said Jane Greer. “They were two such different types. Kirk was something of a method actor. And Bob was Bob. You weren’t going to catch him acting. But they both tried to get the advantage. At one point they were actually trying to upstage each other by who could sit the lowest. The one sitting the lowest had the best camera angle, I guess–I don’t know what they were thinking. Bob sat on the couch, so Kirk sat on the table, then one sat on the footstool, and by the end I think they were both on the floor.”

Ebert’s review of the movie is well worth reading.

The writer Barry Hannah died yesterday. I’ve read only one of his books, the 2001 novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan, but it definitely got my attention. The plot is a hectic, amped-up brand of southern gothic. The words always felt to me more important and satisfying than the story they told, though. They’re strung into wonderful, unexpected sentences that glint from the page, and those into paragraphs of similar quality. My love of the book rested on its words and sentences. You know how Olympic winners assessingly lift their new medals in surprise at the heft of them? I feel a little like that encountering a word like “slabby” in the following passage.

In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses

Maud Newton, who’s crushed by Hannah’s loss, has posted several worthwhile links, including one to a strikingly frank Paris Review interview with the author. “The talent of word facility,” he says, “is unteachable and uncoachable….I believe you should have the words handy. Not that they all have to be perfect–there’s a lot of cross-outs–but language-to-hand is the sine qua non.”

I just finished reading Straight Man, the Richard Russo novel that centers around the life of a regional college English department and that is often mentioned in the same breath as Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, David Lodge’s novels, and the granddaddy of the genre, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. I didn’t find Russo’s book of a piece with these others; it’s too well-meaning. It’s funny and perceptive, but ultimately soft on all its characters, its barbs a breed apart from Amis’s and Jarrell’s skewering glee. By comparison to them, it’s positively affectionate.
While I appreciate that quality in a book, I never entirely warmed up to Russo’s warm-hearted satire, except for isolated strands within an densely populated, highly eventful plot. For instance: the main character, English professor William Henry Devereaux Jr., is haunted through the book by the suicide of a local who shares his name:

Within sight of where we sit waiting to turn onto Pleasant Street, a man named William Cherry, a lifelong Conrail employee, has recently taken his life by lying down on the track in the middle of the night. At first the speculation was that he was one of the men laid off the previous week, but the opposite turned out to be true. He had in fact just retired with his pension and full benefits. On television his less fortunate neighbors couldn’t understand it. He had it made, they said.

Later the narrator voices his “deep conviction that when William Cherry’s severed head was borne up the tracks by a train in the direction of Bellemonde, no one, not even his loved ones, suspected what was in it.” And finally:

After all, not far from where I sit, a man my age, a man named William Cherry has recently surrendered his life by lying down on the track and allowing something larger and more powerful than himself to bear away and out of this world some pain I will never know.

That’s a gorgeous, powerful sentence, if also a disturbingly seductive brief for the ameliorative power of suicide. It moved me as much as anything in the novel.
Also very wonderful is a thread that proves the linchpin of the narrator’s relationship with his imposing, distant father–a prominent literary critic of his time who, toward the end of the book, returns to his family after decades apart. In midcareer the father, William Henry Devereaux Sr., had rescued himself from a late-onset fear of speaking that threatened to derail his career by, in part, delivering an especially impassioned indictment of Charles Dickens.

The class was on Dickens, a writer my father particularly despised for his sentimentality and lack of dramatic subtlety, and never did a scholar lay more complete waste to a dead writer than my father to Charles Dickens that day….He had given the same lecture before, but never like this. In a fit of unplanned dramatic ecstasy, he read Jo’s death scene from Bleak House to such devastating comic effect that by the time he’d finished the entire class was on the floor. Then they got up off the floor and gave him a standing ovation. This was what they’d paid their money for. Finally, they felt themselves to be in the presence of greatness, as they slammed Bleak House shut with contempt.

Perhaps you can sense what’s coming. On his father’s return to his wife and son, the two men go for a walk.

“You may find this strange,” he says, “but I’ve started rereading Dickens.”

Clearly he imagines he’s paying the author a compliment by returning in his final years to a writer whose mawkishness he’s derided over a long career. ‘Much of the work is appalling, of course. Simply appalling,” my father concedes, genuflecting before his previous wisdom on the subject. “Most of it, probably. But there is something there, isn’t there. Some power…something”–he searches for the right word here–“transcendent, really.”

…

“I feel almost,” he says, “as though I had sinned against that man.”

This remarkable passage doesn’t end here, but I don’t want to spoil it entirely for any of you who may yet read this book. The book’s main story of small-campus egos and professional politics run amok is amusing enough, nicely observed, and deftly written. But these minor moments made the book worthwhile for me.

I’m about to write way too much about something whose chief virtue is its unlabored concision. Forgive me. I am really excited.
The wonderful Kate Beaton has posted a great set of comic strips suggested by some of Edward Gorey’s well-known pocket book cover illustrations. I recommend to you Beaton’s entire body of work (fully archived on her Web site), but none of it more than these inspired little vignettes.
By now some of the drawings Gorey made for Anchor and Vintage in the 1950s have achieved iconic status themselves. Beaton’s spontaneous but thoughtful spinoffs inventively pay homage while illuminating the choices Gorey made, which turn out to be so interesting. She reminds one that–far more so than almost any cover on a work of classic literature one sees today–his drawings were a pretty high form of interpretation.

Three years ago I learned how to knit, and since then it’s been hard to stop. I think the key to my obsession is that knitting is equally an exercise in consumerism and creation: you get to buy something lovely and then make it into a different kind of nice thing. The latter follows what’s often a protracted period of deliberation, ruled by a sense of possibility.
Before knitting itself comes a trip to the yarn store, as sweetly anticipated by me and my knitting buddy as a penny-candy store outing by a kid with a five-dollar bill. As goods go, yarn is particularly seductive–pure color and texture in endless variety. Seeing the colors of a yarn together makes each color more fetching. With some yarns, the effect of seeing all the colors together is to make choosing virtually impossible–I’ve been putting Malabrigo Twist skeins into an online shopping cart and taking them out again every day for the last two weeks.
In terms of presentation, the Chicago store my friend and I favor is to yarn what Whole Foods is to produce: expert at arranging things to snare the eye and make you want to touch–to fondle, really. More than my friend, I choose my purchases without a purpose in mind, validated by the excellent convention of the stash. Not knowing what I’ll make is a big part of the pleasure. In this way I end up with two skeins of most of what I buy, and consequently a lot of scarves and hats.
An editor I used to work for sometimes got to reminiscing about her idyllic housewife/mom days. As a representative experience of that time, she usually invoked afternoons spent at the market searching for the perfect tomato–not time spent in the kitchen chopping it. With a couple of possible exceptions, I’ve been a lot less taken with the items I’ve knitted than with the yarn I started with and its pure potential. I don’t think this is just because I’m not a great knitter, though I’m not. I love the first ten rows of every project–watching it barely begin to become something. But mostly I seem to love shopping.

I stumbled on the following passage in some old papers from my book publishing days, when one photocopied rather than bookmarked pieces of writing one hoped to return to. It’s Roger Rosenblatt on “culture-writers” (he’s thinking of Ken Kesey in particular) versus “writer-writers” (he doesn’t name any):

A writer-writer writes to be read. A culture-writer writes to be oohed….
…the errors of the culture-writer are more than matters of style. He mistakes invention for imagination, and he adopts craziness as a view of the world. The first of these errors leads him to believe that bizarrerie is sufficient for art. Invent some wacky, improbable, unheard of person, language, or circumstance, and that will do it. (The influence in recent decades of “magical realism” has only made the situation worse.) Think of it this way. Invention in literature is like building a house starting with the porch. Imagination begins at the hearth, usually something quite simple and recognizable in human experience. From that core it may sprout wings, beaks, and flames, but the reader is always drawn to, and by, the core.
The culture-writer’s most serious error, however, lies in his sense of life. He comes to see human experience as essentially wild and crazy. Whether he is led to this view by style and invention, or whether style and invention are the products of the view, the result is a literature that sees the world as purposeless and freakish. This is something much less strict and serious than irrationalism. Of such writing one does not ask, “What is here?” What is here is painfully obvious. One asks instead, “What is missing?” And what is missing are recognizable human conflicts and the thoughts and feelings of people one cares for. The collapse of such writing into mere effects is no surprise: this is literature that has lost touch with everything but itself.

The occasion for this is a 1992 review in the New Republic of Kesey’s novel Sailor Song. The other example Rosenblatt offers of a culture-writer is Norman Mailer in the second half of his career. It’s a little bit James Wood avant la lettre, isn’t it?