A Caricature

 

The Flutter of Those Stainless Pinions

 By the time a word — any perfectly serviceable, common word like “gratitude” — ends up as calligraphy on scented candles and whitewashed barn slats, it is pretty much done. It’s like picking up a dull knife. Stale as old cake. It’s a shame. It’s a particular shame as it’s a particularly good word, gratitude. (I suppose that no one wants a candle called “shame,” though I rather like the idea as a hostess gift.) As it is, the word now makes one blush to see “gratitude” in the title of a serious book or even at the foot of a letter. All the Oprah of it has not so much dispersed since the 90s as it has soaked and spread into a generalized wet. Local morning show Barbies in minor markets punctuate cooking segments with it. It must be heard in mega church services nearly as often as “Lord” — a word otherwise so archaic as to be abandoned now everywhere but the upper house of Parliament and Bridgerton. It seems everyone is now so very grateful for everything — and to whom? — as to actually be indifferent to context. See? I’m grateful! It’s right there on my travel mug.

I blame Zen. More correctly, I blame all those little old monks and nuns and Tibetan by adoption students from Kansas or Brooklyn who turned us away from Ravi Shankar’s slappin’ sitar and convinced us to sit still. So much sitting still. Not their fault really, but when not suggesting detachment from all of our stuff, they did tend to ask everybody to just sit still and study a blade of grass. And not just study the blade of grass but to be grateful for, I don’t know, the green of it all? (Reminding me of another nearly ruined word when used now in any non-agricultural setting, “cultivate.”)

Pure speculation and probably not helpful because it doesn’t really matter how the word came to be code for sunshine and coffee and puppies and another day cancer-free. What matters more is that it is a necessary word still to understand specifically 19th Century novels, and particularly Henry James — not that he would recognize the word now that it’s been tattooed everywhere.

Not the first word to arise in The Portrait of a Lady. It’s a novel chuck full of good words, but this one didn’t occur to me until I was rereading my way through Isabel Archer’s beaus. So many eager suitors even before the girl comes into her luck, as it were. Every one a gentleman. Every one of them surprisingly responsive to the lady’s charms, including a pretty figure and face, but also a pretty quick wit, as well as character and more will than is usual in Victorian heroines generally. (James never stints on what we might now call “agency” when it comes to his women — even in the face of custom and the expectations of the day, even when they can’t quite do anything about it.) All of these men are attractive one way or another, all possess what James might call “points” to their advantage; money, position in society, refinement, even sensitivity after a distinctly masculine fashion. And yet each potential romance proved incredibly frustrating to read again as a very grown person.

What they all want from Isabel and don’t get is — you guessed it — gratitude. She’s engaging, responsive, kind. She says, “no.” Actually she says, “no, but thank you for asking,” but that is not enough. They are flummoxed because she didn’t say “yes.” They’re indignant moreover because she didn’t say, “YES! Thank you!” It finally occurred to me that all these men were waiting not for the acceptance but the requisite gratitude. I mean, how could she not?!

Kindness confuses. It’s expected. Demanded. But without consent, kindness might as well be a slap in their bewhiskered chops. These guys (a word, to my knowledge, James never used,) are all willing to wait — but only because they assume that “yes” is inevitable. When it doesn’t come, well, that’s just ungrateful. That’s just wrong. It’s stunning.

Not to spoil anything for the reader, but eventually the lady does consent to marry. Not a great choice, by the way, but what the author has rather slyly let us know well beforehand is that making the choice isn’t really where her Fate goes awry. Reading the novel this time, in my very late middle age, I’m pretty sure that for a woman when James was writing, marriage was Fate. The fact that his heroine here might escape it altogether is an anachronistic modern reading. James wrote more than a few unmarried women, but even at their best, this was if not tragic, then at least not devoutly to be wished. And money wasn’t enough to compensate. Spinsterhood was hard. (Widows might be luckier.) What’s wrong with Isabel Archer’s Fate is in the possessive. That this woman thinks it is hers is her mistake.

Though of course it isn’t because ultimately it is. The book famously ends without quite telling the reader what we want to hear. James did that more than once. One of his most modern habits. One of the reasons he’s never been more widely liked, and one of the reasons he’s still widely and closely read. Fate isn’t real. It’s not an actual thing. Maybe when the old Gods still had a dog in every fight and held beauty contests with tragic outcomes and the like, but James didn’t give a snap for classical mythology and he certainly wasn’t beholden to Arcadian plotting or ancient ideals. The only God in James is Henry, and his only religion is his art. Remember, Henry James is never not an American. Outside looking in (maybe through the keyhole.) I suspect that for him this means seeing through things as much as looking at them. Cathedrals are architecture. Gods are false. People are real, and really fascinating if you’re always other — and Henry is the definition of other — and he’s always looking really, really hard.

Among his most arduous tasks as a novelist was to make women real. There were already lots and lots and frankly wagon-loads of wonderful women in novels, and some of the best novels by then were written by women. He appreciated Austen. He loved George Eliot. He didn’t assume he had any special insight, only his art — and that was made from observation and composition. Those were his tools. So when he set to writing women specifically it was in part because he saw them. Think. Name another male novelist even today who spent more time in the company of and listening to women. Doesn’t mean he was by any stretch either a feminist or a sociologist. He was social. What he collected was conversation, confidences, appearances. I don’t know that it’s even fair to say that he liked women, not because he was gay, you understand. Lots of us do, though by no means all, sadly. Still men. He liked company, mixed company as they used to say. Often as not women were the better half of society as he understood it. He owed them his attention, and in his way, characters like Isabel Archer are an expression of — yes — his gratitude.

***

Gratitude isn’t really the stuff of novels though, really more of a poetic theme: Stanley Kunitz in the garden, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry in the field, Jane Kenyon for Donald Hall, Donald Hall for Jane Kenyon and baseball and getting old. The getting older may be the key there. Thankfulness expands as the horizon narrows? The “To Whom?” question seems to trail off nearer the end and nearly every poet who gets to be old becomes a pantheist. (I used to explain late Mary Oliver to new readers as, “went to the mailbox this glorious morning” poems.)

Selling poetry is working at a fruit stand, if the reader will forgive the clumsy metaphor (not a poet, me.) There will always be a few people willing to try something exotic, something bitter or tart, but most people are looking for something ripe, something sweet. Not saccharine — though we have that in stock too (see Rupi Kaur.) 

“ The readiness is all” when it comes to emotion. Poetry gets right in there. “Gratitude — is not the mention/ Of a Tenderness / But its still appreciation / Out of plumb with speech.” See? Dickinson. 

Poetry is what’s wanted when I try to articulate this present moment, as I am at my mother’s house and I haven’t much time just now for novels.

I note that my mother has never been tall. Shorter now. She was plump most of my life. Now she’s as little and soft and vulnerable as a fawn. “I wish your Dad had lived to see me get small,” she tells me. He never did, but I can see it. Every day she seems smaller as I walk behind her as she can’t walk alone now. 

Every day she thanks me for this and that and every day I’m grateful to be here with her.

I’m grateful to be home and not home. I’m in the house I grew up in, doing my part as best I can to help care for the woman who raised me and I’m doing no better than one might expect. I’m not home with my husband in Seattle where I most want to be except here is where I want to be. (Henry James would not approve of the preceding sentences.) 

It’s hard to read in this house. Not a lot of down-time. Had to do my (virtual) monthly book club while I was here and that took some arranging, but it happened. I was grateful for all the help. Cousin Patty came and sat with Mum while I blathered away on my Zoom. My sister had to go back to Texas. First my sister-in-law then my brother got sick so it was a near run thing, getting those two hours to talk about Henry James.

“The debt immense of endless gratitude” as Milton called it, so perhaps that’s the measure of the thing. No matter how common the word now, there’s really no way to reduce the thing to less. 

So for Henry James and his Isabel and “the flutter of those stainless pinions,” for Dickinson and Milton and all the poets, for family and friends and the help of both, and of my fellow booksellers, and my employers for allowing me to be here, and most for the company of my mother nearer the end than the beginning, for being and not being home, I here express my gratitude.

Be Not Afraid, Brah

 “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” — William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

In the NYT yesterday film critic A. O. Scott wrote with rather blithe skepticism about the Nobel Prize for Literature (and a little less so of Frances Ford Coppola’s new film Megalomania.) “What Good Is Great Literature?” That was the title. 

“Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Right?

Fine. I read the piece end to end and it was not nearly so Philistine as the title suggests. (Do even critics and columnists get to write their own headlines? Even in the New York Times? I always wonder if there isn’t some editorial party whose only real job is goosing up titles. I’m sure it’s a gift, but it often feels like a waiter sticking those horrible birthday cake-sparklers into an otherwise perfectly palatable tiramisu.)

“What good is greatness?” he asks. “The concept has an old fashioned, even retrograde ring.” 

Take those separately, second sentence first, and he’s absolutely right. Conceptually that word “greatness” assumes not just that there must be far more not-so-great by comparison, but also ideas and principles to which the lot probably aspired and only the very few came within a country mile of — to use an old fashioned phrase from my rural youth. The idea of less good writing persists of course, else what’s a freshman essay course for? But just what makes an author not just good or even better but great has never been quite so democratically and hotly disputed as now. 

Good. That’s good trouble. I mean if you happen to be a Professor of English Literature it might not feel great to be alive right now and I genuinely sympathize, but even just within my lifetime there has been SO much work done to loosen the dead hand. SO much. And the results have been a very real boon to literature. We’ve never had such access to all the literature of the world. There are more great translators doing more great work today than ever before. There are more authors, living and dead whose work we can read today than I ever dreamed I’d see in even working in a bookstore.

So is Scott right to suggest that nobody needs a bunch of Swedish academics to hand out those fancy paperweights anymore? (Who still uses a paperweight?) He quite rightly points out that nowadays celebrity, even literary celebrity comes with rewards both financial and personal undreamt of by any writer in history save the occasional Dickens or Twain or Tolstoy — and he’s right to mention that all those old boys were exclusively, well, men. So who needs a Nobel?

And just this morning came the answer. Han Kang won. Scott is also at pains to make sure his readers appreciate that unlike a Pulitzer or a Booker or a National Book Award etc., the Nobel for Literature isn’t awarded for a book but rather for an author’s body of work. The latest recipient has that; a deep and widely respected — and translated — oeuvre. Not everybody gets an oeuvre. And very few writers in history even with one of those gets a Nobel Prize. Does that matter?

Not to disagree with A. O. Scott of the New York Times, but yeah it does. Maybe not to a writer invited to keep a “writer’s notebook” in the paper of record, but to Han Kang? I’m going to say, “yes.” To South Korea? And to folks who have never read her work? To the people like me who read and sell her work? You bet.

The function of regional, national, and international literacy prizes is pretty clear when it comes to getting readers and selling books. Stephen King doesn’t need a prize. Emily Henry doesn’t either. Dr. Chuck Tingle? He’s good. They’ve all achieved celebrity, money, even the kind of fame recognized on morning shows and even TikTok.

Back in the day the comedian Red Buttons used to do a regular routine, particularly at comedy roasts. It was about all the famous people who “never got a dinner,” as in, “Ponce de Leon who said when he discovered the Fountain of Youth said, ‘Where the hell are the paper cups?’ Never got a dinner!” Scott points out that the Nobel Committee, like all such organizations, has frequently missed their chance; as in Vladimir Nobokov never got a dinner! It happens. Graham Green, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg never got a dinner (Nobel Prize.)

Doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve one, maybe even more than some of the people who did win. (Herta Muller? Bob bloody Dylan?! My list.) But this also doesn’t mean Han Kang won to spite Percival Everitt. My personal favorite for years to maybe win has been the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled when Annie Ernaux won!

What it did mean when Annie Ernaux won was that we got all her translated books into stock and displayed them in multiple copies with appropriate signage and sold more Annie Ernaux books than I’d have probably been able to hand-sell in my working lifetime. That’s what it means, why it matters. Hell, we even sold a fair number of Hurta Muller and Jon Fosse books when they won and I barely lifted a finger for those Laureates. 

So “What good is greatness?” He asks? Well, way down here where booksellers and librarians and serious and curious readers not interested in the latest Colleen Hoover pulp happen to be, greatness matters still. We want to know. We like prizes. We read reviews. We want to read the best books we can find. We want to discover Han Kang.

The one thing I can pretty much guarantee most of us won’t be doing? Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.