Category Archives: Books

Update: The British are coming

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Apropos of yesterday’s post, the British (and Germans) are stepping in where U.S. critics and publishers fear to tread. I am informed that Methuen is planning a survey of American playwrights similar to their recent Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, to be edited by Martin Middeke of the University of Augsburg and Peter Paul Schnierer of the University of Heidelberg, who also edited the volume on British plays.

Of course, turnabout is fair play; Terry Teachout’s sensitive, informed, and largely positive review of the recently opened revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Roundabout appears in the Wall Street Journal today. Mr. Teachout:

It’s easy enough to see why Look Back in Anger made so electrifying an impression in 1956. But Mr. Osborne assumes an awareness of Jimmy’s cultural context that most modern-day Americans simply don’t have. He is a member of the first generation of working-class Britons to have received a college education, which fostered in them a sense of possibility that was thwarted by the country’s rigidly stratified class system. Hence his venomous anger at postwar England’s “sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous” upper middle classes, among whom the right accent was far more valuable than a high IQ. In America, where class and money are largely interchangeable, such rage makes no sense, and Jimmy himself is a wholly alien figure, a poverty-stricken slum dweller who opens Look Back in Anger by complaining about the “posh papers” that he reads every Sunday: “Different books — same reviews.” It’s as if Stanley were griping to Stella about how the cartoons in The New Yorker aren’t as clever as they used to be.

The full review is here.

Books: “The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights”

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Before I retire to matters extra-theatrical and non-dramatic, a little unfinished business to be completed. I note the new publication of The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, published by Methuen late last year and edited by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz. Its 520 pages detail the work of 25 dramatists who emerged in the first decade of the 21st century, complete with a gang-written introduction by the editors which places these playwrights and their plays in an aesthetic, political, and cultural context ranging over the last thirty years of world history. The individual chapters on the playwrights themselves are written by a variety of international critics, and include a biographical headnote, an analysis of the playwrights’ major and significant minor plays, and finally a discussion of the plays’ more general characteristics and (as the back-cover copy has it) “their place in the discourses of British theatre.” Avoiding the panegyric, samples of negative reviews are included for most of these writers.

The 25 writers profiled range across the ethnic, social, and gender spectrum, and include writers like debbie tucker green, Tanika Gupta, and Kwame Kwei-Armah; critics include Sierz (on Jez Butterworth), Graham Saunders (on David Eldridge), Ken Urban (on Sarah Kane), Caridad Svich (on Mark Ravenhill), and Dan Rebellato (on Philip Ridley). As to be expected, these individual entries are a mixed bag, though always quite useful. Martin Middeke’s essay on Martin Crimp, for example, is a bit jargon-thick, perhaps inevitable in the profile of a writer fond of postmodernist form. The critics also provide important lists of both primary and secondary texts, however, making this volume an essential contribution to the assessment of European drama.

Such a volume (along with its unofficial companion, The Methuen Drama Book of 21st Century British Plays), published by a major commercial publisher which also publishes collections by many of the playwrights mentioned in the guide, remains indicative of the centrality of the arts of drama and theatre to British culture. These publications come in the wake of two other recent books about drama for the general reader — Sierz’ Rewriting the Nation and Michael Billington’s State of the Nation (this latter published by the commercial U.K. house Faber & Faber, which also maintains an extensive backlist of plays and books of drama criticism) — that take more critical and idiosyncratic views of the landscape.

Needless to say, hundreds of new U.S. dramatists emerged in the first decade of the 21st century as well. But here the possibilities for the discussion of this work via publishing are dimmer. We’ve got no similar volumes about new American dramatic writing from Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, or David Cote from U.S. publishers; I frankly doubt it’s a matter of time, for while these three are busy working journalists and reviewers, so are Billington and Sierz. Commercial U.S. publishers have not published critical work or anthologies like this for years — likely because there is no demand for it. Which underscores the marginality of the drama and theatre to a U.S. culture which has no deeply-rooted concern for the art. While smaller and university publishers continue to publish criticism and new plays, these do not have the reach or resources of major U.S. publishing houses, and remain, as they say, “niche” outlets.

It is something of a shame, because at the situation’s heart is an interesting question: could this new American work itself sustain such assiduous critical inquiry, or would it collapse under the weight of deeper examination? At least some U.S. dramatists are worthy of such treatment: Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, John Jesurun, Theresa Rebeck, Neil LaBute, and Thomas Bradshaw come to mind after only five minutes of thought. First reviews tell only part of the story; if the short newspaper or magazine review is the first draft of cultural history, volumes like the Methuen collection of essays or Sierz’ and Billington’s books are the second, enjoying the additional value of some critical distance from the plays’ original productions and the placement of these plays in a wider aesthetic and political context. And certainly The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights whets the palate for the plays under discussion. The book delightfully informs, instructs, and contemplates the plays themselves: you want to see them, or at least read them (the more likely and convenient option for the American reader). Lacking similar volumes about the U.S. scene, American drama and theatre remain off to one side, and underexamined.

Two William Gaddis novels return to print

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UPDATE: Appearing yesterday on The Paris Review Web site was “Mistaken Identity,” an essay by Jenny Hendrix about Fire the Bastards!, a book concerning the critical reception of The Recognitions by a mysterious “jack green.” The Dalkey Archive Press will also be republishing this most unusual book in February. Gaddis scholar Steven Moore provides an introduction.

With the official republication of William Gaddis‘ The Recognitions and J R next month by the Dalkey Archive Press (available now at amazon.com), all of the novelist’s books are back in print again. I take this opportunity to republish the below post on Gaddis, which first appeared here on 28 September 2010. I also recently posted this 30-minute conversation with Gaddis and critic Malcolm Bradbury.

Those seeking an additional introduction to Gaddis’ work can be referred to Cynthia Ozick’s fine review of Carpenter’s Gothic, his third novel, which appeared in the 7 July 1985 issue of the New York Times.

One of the pleasures of The Paris Review‘s new online archive of their author interviews is the availability of Zoltán Abádi-Negi’s 1987 talk with American novelist William Gaddis (1922-1998).

It would be nice to say that Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions (1955), “burst onto the scene,” but its appearance was greeted with a polite silence in most corners. The novel is among those monumental works of American modernism, like Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Mark Rothko’s paintings and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, that beggar easy description: nearly 1,000 pages in its hardcover edition and not much less in the paperback, The Recognitions, along with Gaddis’ next book J R (1975), are essential to an understanding of the United States in the postwar period. More than this, though, as Sven Birkets wrote in his New York Times Book Review notice of Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ novels constitute in all their brilliance “the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art.”

And Gaddis was, quite explicitly, a modernist writer. “Speaking of influences, I think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my contemporaries,” Gaddis told Abádi-Negi shortly after the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); in the interview Gaddis demonstrates little enthusiasm for either postmodern fiction or criticism. In form, style and content, Gaddis’ five novels are largely composed of Americans talking: J R is set out almost entirely in dialogue, and A Frolic of His Own (1994) incorporates most of Gaddis’ only (unproduced) play, Once at Antietam.

Gaddis is, on the surface, a satirist, but like Horace, Swift and Kraus he is far more than that. All of his novels painfully and often hilariously tear the scabs from the American experience, the Puritan ethic and Western capitalism, but underlying all of it is a firm faith in the redemptive qualities of aesthetic creation, always under siege from the administered society from which it rather wondrously and paradoxically emerges. He begins broadly — the locales of The Recognitions circle the globe — but as time goes on his focus becomes narrower. J R is set largely in Long Island and New York City; Carpenter’s Gothic in an isolated New England house (constantly barraged from within by television stories and telephone messages from far-off African lands); A Frolic of His Own, his satire of the legal system (and therefore the administered American culture), in a home on Eastern Long Island; and finally, in his brilliant short novel explicitly influenced by Thomas Bernhard, Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), in the room and the mind of a dying man (also suggesting that other master of the rooms and minds of dying men, Samuel Beckett).

There is a development in Gaddis’ work from the monumental to the concise, stripping down to the core the essence of Gaddis’ satiric vision: that of opportunities lost, of humanity unable to achieve its hopes, in either art or life. As he writes in the very last pages of Agapē Agape:

Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev [a character in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata], those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

The satirist’s vision is hung between the tragic and the ecstatic; it’s to Gaddis’ great talent that we can owe its brilliant containment in comic form (the events of A Frolic of His Own, for example, begin when the main character, novelist and Gaddis-double Oscar Crease, manages to run himself over with his own car); and though these last words are the cry of a dying man, Gaddis was a great one for first sentences, too:

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. (The Recognitions)

– Money … ? in a voice that rustled. (J R)

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. (A Frolic of His Own)

Gaddis’ work has been eclipsed by that of many of his contemporaries — among those living, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth; among those dead, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer — but it is heartening to see that, in 2010, his satiric vision hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, despite the notorious “Mr. Difficult” essay by Oprah’s Book Club favorite Jonathan Franzen, which in all its condescending and moronic glory appeared in a 2002 issue of The New Yorker. All of Gaddis’ novels, as well as his book of essays The Rush for Second Place (2002), remain in print. Though one shudders to think what Gaddis would think of the Internet after the cacophony of J R, the Internet has been kind to him. There is an excellent Web site devoted to his novels here; it includes the full text of Stephen Moore’s groundbreaking 1989 full-length study of the novelist. There is another excellent collection of Gaddis pages at The Modern Word‘s “Scriptorium” here. I was fortunate enough to take a class with William Gaddis at Bard College on “The Literature of Failure” in 1979, which I wrote about several years ago here (my contribution begins about halfway down the page).

Gilgamesh

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Available shortly will be the initial publication of Contra Mundum Press, Stuart Kendall’s new translation of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic poem. According to the press release:

The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure,  mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew scriptures, and Islamic literature. Known for his translations of Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard, and others, Kendall’s first translation of an ancient text is informed by his work in the history of consciousness at the intersections of poetics, philosophy, theology, and visual culture. While scholarly translations often dilute the expressive force of the original and popular versions distort its pagan ethics, Kendall’s Gilgamesh honors both, creating what  Jerome Rothenberg has called nothing less than “the exemplary version for our time.”

CMP also offers this excerpt from the volume, which includes Kendall’s fine introduction and a few pages of the translation itself. It will be available in full at amazon.com and from other sources soon; watch the CMP Web site for details.

Friday video: William Gaddis

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William Gaddis. Photo: Marion Ettlinger

I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Abu Ghraib photographs of a few years ago. There are a few elements of the story that relate it to drama, not the least of which is that the desecration of the corpses of the enemy dead is a driving factor in one of the greatest Greek tragedies as well. Nor have the political and psychological elements that led to Abu Ghraib been explicitly examined by American dramatists, really. While I can name off the top of my head two or three British dramatists who might examine the dynamics that led to both events, I can name few American dramatists who might do so, and it’s not merely because we are too close in time, as some would have it, to these events. The great American dramatist of the Vietnam War, David Rabe, wrote his fine trilogy of plays about that conflict (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the midst of the war, and they remain powerful today. It is also telling that all three of Rabe’s plays are set in the United States, not Vietnam. Rabe’s explorations were incisive examinations of the cultural, social, and psychological cost of the conflict, not only to combatants but on the home front as well. His conclusions were dark, pessimistic, and brutal, resisting easy answers or a twee unwarranted humanistic optimism, and perhaps these are unacceptable qualities in the new play sector today, even as the sector congratulates itself for its cultural relevance and political acumen.

The painful domestic cost of American brutalist colonialism and imperialism were a concern of novelist William Gaddis as well, especially in his 1985 novel Carpenter’s Gothic, which he discusses in the 1986 interview with Malcolm Bradbury below. A master of dialogue, Gaddis set his novel among five characters in a Hudson River house — the location never extends beyond the confines of the house or its five characters, not unlike many American realist plays — but it describes in intimate detail the means by which the outside world spiritually cripples and physically destroys those in whose name the colonialism and imperialism are being imposed half a world away. The 30-minute interview with Gaddis is a rare treat, and it’s a delight to see the kind of slouched gentlemanliness that is all too rare these days, in the world of literature or anywhere else. I should also note that Gaddis’ The Recognitions and J R are being reissued next month by the Dalkey Archive Press.