The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky




Tom Wolfe CreditMark Seliger


“If you are not having a fight with somebody,” Tom Wolfetold The Guardian in 2004, “then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning.”


Mr. Wolfe is famous for his bright-eyed and best-selling books of literary journalism (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” in 1968, “The Right Stuff” in 1979) and for jumbo-size social novels like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) and “A Man in Full” (1998). Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine.


He took aim at Modern art and its enabling theorists in “The Painted Word” (1975) and modern architecture and its critical druids in “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981). In his essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989) he bird-dogged the American literary establishment for its solipsistic retreat from realism. He referred to three of his antagonists — John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving — in the title of another essay, published in 2000, as “My Three Stooges.”


Mr. Wolfe’s assaults were not meant to be well received by his entrenched opponents, and indeed they were not. He was tagged as an incorrigible philistine and worse. Few took his more combative books and essays altogether seriously, though they sharpened the conversation. Oddly, little of the stirred mud stuck to him. To recall these contretemps is to freshly appreciate Mr. Wolfe’s cameo appearance in “The Simpsons” when, after Homer smears chocolate on the author’s trademark white suit, Mr. Wolfe yanks it off to reveal an identical clean one underneath.


Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists.







Secondarily, this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky, whom Mr. Wolfe refers to as “Noam Charisma.” Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff.

Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds; in fact, he is an atheist. He begins by declaring the notion of the big bang to be vaguely ridiculous, and likens it to a mythopoetic bedtime story. Everything came from nothing?

Most essentially, Mr. Wolfe employs new research from the controversial anthropologist Daniel Everett to argue that the power of speech — man’s signal attribute — is not the product of evolution at all but rather a tool that man created. “Bango!” Mr. Wolfe writes. “There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal.” He wonders how airtight the theory of evolution can be if it does not account for such a thing. “What is it,” he asks, “that has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled when it comes to speech?”

Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms of sussing out speech, through the combined use of anatomy and physiology and biochemistry. The structures that support language don’t fossilize, so evidence is simply harder to come by. This is not something we will lose sleep over, no matter how much you pogo and spit in the Sid Vicious manner.

Mr. Chomsky, on the other hand, reading “The Kingdom of Speech,” may lose a bit of sleep. Mr. Wolfe chronicles the arguments against two of that linguist’s central theories — the notion that humans are born with an unseen language organ in the brain, and the complicated structural concept of recursion in language — and declares Mr. Chomsky to be bankrupt in nearly every regard, a pretentious man whose ideas set linguistic study back for decades. He narrates disputations of Mr. Chomsky’s work as if they were prizefights: “OOOF! — right into the solar plexus!”

Mr. Wolfe seems especially incensed that as a scholar, Mr. Chomsky privileged mental work over fieldwork, making linguistics an indoor rather than an outdoor pursuit. (In this book’s first section, Mr. Wolfe attacks Charles Darwin on similar grounds, paying almost no attention to the nearly five years Darwin spent aboard the Beagle.) These arguments neatly parallel his brief against American novelists whom, Mr. Wolfe thinks, don’t get out of the house nearly enough.

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, there is a great deal of funny and acid commentary on social class. About the possibility that Darwin, a wealthy and connected British gentleman, might have plundered some of his ideas about evolution from Alfred Russel Wallace, a social nobody, he writes:

“The British Gentleman was not merely rich, powerful, and refined. He was also a slick operator … smooth … smooth … smooth and then some. It was said that a British Gentleman could steal your underwear, your smalls and skivvies and knickers, and leave you staring straight at him asking if he didn’t think it had turned rather chilly all of a sudden.”

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, a torrent of language is set free. Sentences spin past like whirligigs, or like Rube Goldberg devices that emit a pellet of information only after bouncing off four increasingly unlikely surfaces.

Mr. Wolfe’s prose here is mostly sure-footed, but there are moments when he seems on the verge of losing it, of falling into fragments of Morse-code nonsense that will put older readers in mind of the insane ellipses-filled columns Larry King once filed for USA Today.

Here is Mr. Wolfe, for example, on the work of eight evolutionists he wishes to mock: “I surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon the only academic I could find who disagreed with the eight failures, a chemist at Rice University … Rice … Rice used to have a big-time football team … the Rice Owls … wonder how they’re doing now? I moused around on the Rice site some more, and uh-oh … not so great last season, the Owls … football … and I surfed to football concussions … exactly as I thought!” The call-waiting system in his cranium, here and elsewhere, has gone haywire.

“The Kingdom of Speech” is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Space. Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds). Routledge. 2016.

Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Space. Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds). Routledge. 2016.

The term ‘atmosphere’ has recently gained new momentum in interdisciplinary academic discourse, much of which revolves around discussions of ‘affect’ and sensual perceptions of place and architecture. This perspective puts the materiality of built space centre stage, emphasising the profound link between our physical environment and perception. This discourse appears to be ahead of, though potentially also complementary to, the ways in which archaeological studies construct the ‘social’, ‘economic’ or ‘cultural’ elements of architecture from found ruins or objects.

The substantial collection Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Space, edited by Mikkel Bille and Tom Flohr Sørensen, aims to bring current architectural and archaeological thinking together in order to explore the atmospheric aspects of architecture, rather than ‘just’ its functional or aesthetic ones.

Key to this endeavour is promoting an understanding of architecture not as a static entity, but as an ‘assemblage of elements’, tangible and intangible, which oscillate between materiality, performance/process and meaning-making. By not advocating archaeological over architectural studies or vice versa, the ‘ontological vagueness’ (3) emerging from the focus on architectural atmospheres is here placed centrally for the study of built/building space, whether in the past, present or future.

What is most intriguing about this collection is how the editors set the scene: rather than juxtaposing architectural and archaeological studies, they outline a shared ontologicalproblem. By deploying ‘documentation, drawing plans and making typologies’ as strategies to stabilise architecture into ‘bounded and tangible objects’ (6), both disciplines tend to be blind to the affective qualities of space. Departing from this shared problem, the editors provoke analytical tensions among contributions, which they channel intelligently and productively into four book sections: ‘Form and Temporality’ (Part 1); ‘Atmospheres’ (Part 2); ‘Performance and Process’ (Part 3); and ‘Disintegration and Unfinishedness’ (Part 4), each of which is introduced separately.

‘Form and Temporality’ focuses on temporality, motion and scale to explore how architecture gains form. It is premised on the assumption that archaeological studies of architecture have much to contribute to processual understandings of built space as they tend to privilege building practices over buildings as objects. Contributions in this section vary widely, ranging from Lesley K. McFadyen’s piece on the immanent materials that become invisible in archaeological studies of architecture; Michal Murawski on the affective, scalar and political powers of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science; Jonathan Hill’s investigation of ruins and monuments; Gavin Lucas’s on building as constant and dynamic change; Alison Kohn and Shannon Lee Dawdy’s work on informal settlements in Bolivia; to a photo essay by Mark Minkjan and Ingel Vaikla on Brussel’s contested urban condition.

‘Atmospheres’ then explicitly turns to questions around how spaces feel. Focusing on the immaterial aspects of architecture, such as air and light, contributions explore the link between spatial atmosphere, perception and the built environment. Here, Tim Ingold argues for an inclusion of affect, emotion, rhythm, light and air into notions of architecture, which otherwise tend to focus on form. Jürgen Hasse surveys the German intellectual tradition of engaging with the term ‘atmosphere’ to argue for infrastructure, such as bridges or tunnels, as highly affective rather than surplus spaces. Oliver J. T. Harris returns to the notion of ‘assemblage’ to state that architecture is about ‘becoming’, and therefore not only includes the elements that form part of a building, but also a much wider network of human and non-human actors. Closing this section, Serena Love argues for the importance of materials and their meanings in relation to how spaces feel.

‘Performance and Process’ shifts focus to the social dimension of space, how enactments and lived experiences of people structure architecture and vice versa, premised on the understanding that social practices continuously transform built space. The section starts off with Albena Yaneva’s piece on how architectural images work beyond representation to participate in shaping the city. It then moves on to Larry J. Zimmerman’s intriguing work on homelessness and the necessity of home-making under the constant threat of eviction. Drawing on research in Mozambique, Morten Nielsen gives a detailed account of how personhood is deeply entangled with the ongoing process of building a house. The section closes with Nick Kaye’s explorations of the works of artist Vito Acconci and Augusta McMahon’s piece emphasising the significance of lived experience in ancient Mesopotamia.

The last section, ‘Disintegration and Unfinishedness’, turns to the question of what happens to built space when it decays and falls to ruin. Drawing again on assemblage theory, it argues that architecture does not finish when it fails but can adopt new forms of use and experience. Here, Tim Edensor investigates the reuse of industrial ruins in the UK and their newly emerging multiple temporalities. Þóra Pétursdóttir explores how an abandoned Icelandic herring station has become a popular tourist destination, while Michael A. Ulfstjerne investigates architecture and planning in post-economic boom Mongolia to promote an understanding of building as contingent. Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt analyses ‘designed tourist sites’ in Norway to argue that dissatisfaction among tourists may emerge from the fact that these sites are presented as finalised rather than emerging. Rosemary Joyce’s final piece looks at how architecture, materials and people are linked through notions of failure by investigating nuclear waste containment in the USA.

Unmistakably, this edited collection presents an enormous wealth of complementary work that all in some way links to atmosphere, architecture and archaeology. The intellectual ambition of this book is certainly impressive, and the editors deliver significant conceptual legwork to bring analytical frameworks together that have to date been referenced jointly, but never truly linked up. This is an important, if not the main, achievement of the book, but it comes at a cost: some readers may be overwhelmed by both the analytical density and the sheer amount of contributions in this hefty volume.

Though we can agree with the editors’ statement that the diversity of the approaches signals the quality of this volume, we need to ask if such breadth is actually helpful for advancing current thinking on atmosphere, space and the archaeological method, or whether it contributes to conflating these spheres. Perhaps we have to distinguish between the expert and the interested reader: while the book may well become a key work of reference for scholars and practitioners working on the themes it addresses and prompt conceptual and methodological debate, others may choose more selected reading and engagement.

However, what this collection certainly does is bring together some of the most relevant scholars in the field of social science studies of architecture, atmosphere and materiality, which is an accomplishment. Here, works that are grounded in empirical social research undoubtedly are highlights, not least because they take seriously the notion of ‘atmosphere’ which puts people (and not analysts) and their experiences centre stage.

Overall, the editors should be applauded for tying together not only the seemingly remote fields of architecture and archaeology, but also such wide-ranging contributions. With many thought-provoking statements, Elements of Architecture will most certainly kick off more debate on atmosphere, architecture and archaeology. And because some of it can also be read as a critical commentary on architectural and archaeological methods, it will be an interesting and critical read particularly for architecture and archaeology students, scholars and practitioners.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari is published by Harvill Secker.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari is published by Harvill Secker.
How data will destroy human freedom

It’s a chilling prospect, but the AI we’ve created could transform human nature, argues this spellbinding new book by the author of Sapiens


Mind and machine … a cross section of an artificial brain. Photograph: Alamy


At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other (which doesn’t mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google – the search engine, not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.

Yuval Noah Harari’s previous book, the global bestseller Sapiens, laid out the last 75,000 years of human history to remind us that there is nothing special or essential about who we are. We are an accident. Homo sapiens is just one possible way of being human, an evolutionary contingency like every other creature on the planet. That book ended with the thought that the story of homo sapiens could be coming to an end. We are at the height of our power but we may also have reached its limit. Homo Deus makes good on this thought to explain how our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something new.

The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms – the ones that we have built – can do it far more efficiently than we can. That’s what Harari means by the “uncoupling” of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that’s not true any more. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us.
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Not all of this is new. The modern state, which has been around for about 400 years, is really just another data-processing machine. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, called it an “automaton” (or what we would call a robot). Its robotic quality is the source of its power and also its heartlessness: states don’t have a conscience, which is what allows them sometimes to do the most fearful things. What’s changed is that there are now processing machines that are far more efficient than states: as Harari points out, governments find it almost impossible to keep up with the pace of technological advance. It has also become much harder to sustain the belief – shared by Hobbes – that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings. The modern insistence on the autonomy of the individual goes along with a view that it should be possible to find the heart of this heartless world. Keep scratching at a faceless bureaucracy and you’ll eventually uncover a civil servant with real feelings. But keep scratching at a search engine and all you’ll find are data points.

We are just at the start of this process of data-driven transformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stop it. Homo Deus is an “end of history” book, but not in the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stop. Rather the opposite: things are moving so fast that it’s impossible to imagine what the future might hold. In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully about what the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in. That’s history: a sequence of events in which human beings play the leading part. But the world of 2100 is at present almost unimaginable. We have no idea where we’ll fit in, if at all. We may have built a world that has no place for us.

Given what an alarming thought this is, and since we aren’t there yet, why can’t we do more to stop it from happening? Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in charge of their fate was never much more than a leap of faith. Real power always resided with networks. Individual human beings are relatively powerless creatures, no match for lions or bears. It’s what they can do as groups that has enabled them to take over the planet. These groupings – corporations, religions, states – are now part of a vast network of interconnected information flows. Finding points of resistance, where smaller units can stand up to the waves of information washing around the globe, is becoming harder all the time.
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Some people have given up the fight. In place of the founding tenets of modernity – liberalism, democracy and personal autonomy – there is a new religion: Dataism. Its followers – many of whom reside in the Bay Area of California – put their faith in information by encouraging us to see it as the only true source of value. We are what we contribute to data processing. There is potentially a huge upside to this: it means we will face fewer and fewer obstacles to getting what we want, because the information needed to supply us will be instantly accessible. Our likes and our experiences will merge. Our lifespans could also be hugely extended: Dataists believe that immortality is the next frontier to be crossed. But the downside is obvious, too. Who will “we” be any more? Nothing more than an accumulation of information points. Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals with the power of the state. That won’t be necessary in the coming century. As Harari says: “The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.”

Corporations and governments will continue to pay homage to our individuality and unique needs, but in order to service them they will need to “break us up into biochemical subsystems”, all of them permanently monitored by powerful algorithms. There is a dystopian political aspect to this, too: the early adopters – the individuals who sign up first to the Dataist project – will be the only ones with any real power left and it will be relatively unchallenged. Gaining entry into this new super-elite will be incredibly hard. You’ll need heroic levels of education plus zero squeamishness about marrying your personal identity with intelligent machines. Then you can become one of the new “gods”. It’s a grim prospect: a small priestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source of knowledge, and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vast schemes. The future could be a digitally supercharged version of the distant past: ancient Egypt multiplied by the power of Facebook.

Harari is careful not to predict that these outlandish visions will come to pass. The future is unknowable, after all. He reserves his strongest opinions for what all this should mean for the current state of relations between humans and animals. If intelligence and consciousness are coming apart then this puts most human beings in the same situation as other animals: capable of suffering at the hands of the possessors of superior intelligence. Harari does not seem too worried about the prospect of robots treating us like we treat flies, with violent indifference. Rather, he wants us to think about how we are treating animals in our vast industrialised farming systems. Pigs unquestionably suffer when living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated from their young. If we think this suffering doesn’t count because it is not allied to a higher intelligence, then we are building a rod for our own backs. Soon the same will be true of us. And what price our suffering then?
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This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit. But as Harari would probably be the first to admit, it’s only intelligent by human standards, which are nothing special. By the standards of the smartest machines it’s woolly and speculative. The datasets are pretty limited. Its real power comes from the sense of a distinctive consciousness behind it. It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart. Harari cares about the fate of animals in a human world but he writes about the prospects for homo sapiens in a data-driven world with a lofty insouciance. I have to admit I found this deeply appealing, but that may be because of who I am (apart from anything else, a man). Not everyone will find it so. But it is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill. Nietzsche once wrote that humanity is about to set sail on an open sea, now that we have finally left Christian morality behind. Homo Deus makes it feel as if we are standing at the edge of a cliff after a long and arduous journey. The journey doesn’t seem so important any more. We are about to step into thin air.

Isaac Bashevis Singer ; An Intimate Portrait

Heartaches & limitations: A portrait of Isaac Bashevis Singer By Al Sundel ( Guest)



Isaac Bashevis Singer at home

Parts of this feature about Polish-born Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer first appeared in the now-defunct Partisan Review, under the title “Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” The piece is written by New York-based writer Al Sundel who knew Singer personally.

Singer was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement. He believed there was still an audience who longed to read stories in Yiddish. “I would not call myself the last Yiddish writer but I am certainly one of the last,” he told The New York Times Book Review in 1972. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He died in 1991.


I first met Isaac Bashevis Singer shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above 100th Street, where the avenue starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator behind a black woman. As the door closed, her man inside put a gun to Singer’s head, speaking in dialect muddled by drugs. The woman lifted Singer’s wallet only to find a few dollars. The doper pushed the muzzle in Singer’s face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand tremored. In his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn’t have any more. It sounds comic, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize. The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling style and the elevator door closed.

The next day Singer shopped for a new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, before it became a gay zone, less than a block and a half from where John Lennon would live and be shot and killed. It was from this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider international audience for his uniquely Jewish writings. The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both a Hasid and a modern-day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people in the past. Rural Hasids were not simply second-class citizens of Poland, in the gloom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by more worldly Jews. Thus, Hasids were often not only beyond the pale in Christendom, but of mainstream Judaism.

The young Singer became a Hasidic vox populi, perhaps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yiddish. This living language was fed to the ovens, too, during the Holocaust. Once in America, the middle-age and elder Singer well knew he was writing of an obscure culture in a dying language. Yet his daily grind kept piling up more reams of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky in a language that was breathing its last. He badly needed translators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce; the money wasn’t there even to pay for indifferent ones. For beginners to translate Singer into English was akin to entry-level archaeology without boots.

Book publishers often helped with his numerous novels. But in order to move his voluminous short stories (well over 100), Singer had to draw on young admirers willing to put in the time. A friend of mine briefly took it on. He asked me to come along as he didn’t know Yiddish well and struggled with Singer’s metaphorical flights. The three of us sat close, hunched over a first-draft translation. Singer would explain what he meant by a paragraph troubling the translator. Then we took liberties to shape it into better Anglo. Multiple visits were needed to put a story to bed, while his wife Alma served coffee. As I didn’t know Yiddish and could not make all the visits necessary, I shot film and gave Singer blow-ups [enlargements of photographic images] to kind of pay my way.



Singer was disappointed with a contact sheet from his publisher’s photographer. The man had taken him to Central Park on a wintry day in a dark coat. The shots made Singer look like a rebel priest sitting chilled on a St Stephen’s Green bench in Dublin, angry at God. Singer chose one of mine, more homey. Years later, I came upon a second photo I took of Singer that I’d given him. It appeared in the NY Times Book Review running full page with the wrong credit line and no check. I didn’t bother to complain.

Coming from a Hasidic rabbinic background, the young Singer was familiar both with the backward countryside and the booming city of Warsaw. The Hasidic movement reached its apogee in Poland in the 18th century, a time when roving Cossack armies raided defenceless Jewish villages with the vilest savagery. Why didn’t the Poles do more to stop them? Nationalistic Poles like to say that Poland is the Christ among all nations. Behind the hype stands a shameless record of Christian anti-Semitism reaching to this day (e.g., the horrors of the Jedwabne pogrom, in which half a Polish town in 1941 murdered the other half for being Jewish). Shtetl Jews were caught between the heinous crimes of Cossacks, the express hostility of Poles and the disdain of worldly Jews.

The rural Hasids formed a populist Jewish sect characterised by clannish fundamentalism, a deep strain of mysticism, and often medieval apparel. Singer chronicled the transition of the rural 17th-century Hasids, through the generations, to urban positions of wealth and power in 20th-century Warsaw. His own life would in time come to exemplify the varied transitional stages from shtetl insularity in Poland to displaced person on bustling 72nd Street off Broadway. Early on, Singer wrote in Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish. As a transitional Hasid, he obviously also spoke Polish in Warsaw. In his twenties, he knew Western culture and German well enough to translate Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun and future prize winner Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, no less) into Yiddish. English appears to be his fifth language.

Medieval times came to an end in Western Europe circa 1492. But not for much of the planet. Eastern Europe stagnated in superstition (e.g., Dracula, wolf men, fertile ground for Frankenstein, exorcist magic, sightings in the sky, etc), especially in the outlying villages. It remained ‘Brueghelian’ well into the 20th century, as large parts of the world remain today; that is, eat, drink, fornicate and be superstitious. In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto was more porous to the advances of Western culture. From Warsaw, Singer made 300-year leaps backwards to shtetls and forward again to the vims and vigours of urban intellectual life. In his shtetl stories, he juggled grassroots superstitions. He was not pushing his own occult beliefs. He was reporting what the country folk believed. In his Warsaw stories, he abandoned the supernatural and leaned more to transitional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv, Miami Beach, about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle-class lives without Cossacks, Poles or Nazis savagely attacking them.

Singer’s American stories remained at a far remove from the norms of American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration experience (cf Henry Roth), or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial Jewishness resembled the human coccyx (cf Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tailness. He wrote about displaced persons. His Jews were displaced in rural Poland, displaced in New York City, displaced in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, and especially in America, they metamorphosed. They got ‘melting-potitis.’ Singer’s characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had schlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in multiple displacements from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Judea. They had lost much of their timeline heritage along the way, except some high falutin’ parts. Though half the planet has read the Hebrew Bible, are there even 36 sages who truly understand the long view of 4,000 years of displacement? If sages could not comprehend it, what could you expect of the rest of us? Singer focused on human kitchen problems and heartaches. He tapestried 300 years of Jewish life from rural Poland to Warsaw to America almost as biblical addenda. He can be compared to a Babylonian Jew in the time of Ezra writing about centuries of exiled Jewish life in Assyria and Babylonia, only in far greater quantity than ever survived to our time.






The sheer amount of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is beyond most people’s endurance. You look up from the writing machine to the window at times as if to say, “Hello. Is anybody out there?” Aside from two Partisan Review stalwarts who early translated a story each of his, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at Elba. He had minimal contact with fellow travellers of literary fiction. His folk past was his most trusted companion. Singer would in the end publish a lot because he wrote more than most important writers. Sometimes, as he was writing, he simultaneously conversed with his wife, a kind of soft marital babble as his fingers flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get a little giddy coming out of a writer’s self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal. He preferred to be called “Mr Singer.” He usually wore a funeral dark suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry evenings in the summer, if someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, “We will all remove our jackets.” To receive you in his shirtsleeves, he had to know you well.

He lived at the bourgeois extreme from long-haired Greenwich Village types holed up in tenements with cracked bathtubs in the kitchen from 1912. He once showed me a five-foot painting sent by a female fan. It revealed a nude in a blue-speckled field that struck an emotional high note, like Munch’s “The Scream.” Singer said he didn’t know what to do with it. He kept it facing the wall, but his eyes glittered with a stifled giggle when he showed it.

Singer took deeper pleasure in his beloved pets, yellow parakeets, who might flutter around the living room or alight on him as if he were a tree. At these times, the briefest resemblance to a St Francis kindness to animals might light up his eyes. At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He was cue-ball bald with soft white down behind the ears and ceramic-blue eyes that could shift from penetrating to waggish. He struck me as so grandfatherly, I imagined this aspect began prematurely at 45. He suggested I read Knut Hamsun, despite Hamsun’s having been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II (what good advice!).

We generally took a brisk walk to a hopping-busy cafeteria on Broadway in the 80s or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth brei, he might open up a little. Isaac Bashevis Singer had been burnt in his best years from having too much sensibility and not enough taste of life, love or money. To write a lot means to live little, to let the sun shine for others while you stay holed up in your cell. For decades, he feared he might one day grovel like Hamsun’s character in Hunger, eating his own shoe leather while a woman’s shapely image faded from the retina of his mind. His concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earning stream came from The Jewish Daily Forward, which published his briefs and fiction to an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife, Alma, held a not-so-fancy job in a department store. While he later claimed she didn’t need to work, I suspected it was just the opposite when I first met him. They were comfortable, but not yet secure.

For his first forty years, he lived in the long shadow of his brother, Isadore Joshua Singer, almost ten years older. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fiction), and he had a younger brother, Moses. I J Singer shot out of the blocks in the early ’30s to become known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vistula. He was quickly discovered by The Jewish Daily Forward, who brought him to America.

To this day, some readers prefer I J Singer to I B Singer. I J Singer was published in the US in the ’30s by Liveright and Knopf, then the two most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels about what life was really like behind ghetto and shtetl walls, tales that Sholem Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before, and a completely different kind of Hasid who shucked his medieval caftan and looked like the rest of the modern world. He wrote with bite. I J Singer spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser, an American Catholic. Both I J and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones of muted outrage. I J Singer dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and society. It is not a stretch to describe I J Singer’s vision as Tolstoyan (though he preferred Stendhal) and his talent as huge. Were he mainstream Christian instead of subset Hasid in the Jewish ghetto in anti-Semitic Poland, he would have been an overnight international sensation. Water the flower and it will grow. He was on drip irrigation.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a contradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a little toward the black humour of the regional champion, Gogol (e.g., in Gogol’s short story, “The Nose,” where a man wakes up one morning, discovers his nose missing and goes looking for it, to find it parading about the streets in the man’s cloak with a bluster of a VIP). Above all, Bashevis Singer’s fiction teemed with characters harried by the myriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life’s many spear thrusts of deceit. (A man climbs in the window of a woman late at night, convinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with her, then leaves — to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters seem to float willy-nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel’s era or today in Miami Beach? Not really. The same things happened to them, but far less brutally and superstitiously in America. Only after his death could we fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart.

Isaac Bashevis Singer ; An Intimate Portrait

Heartaches & limitations: A portrait of Isaac Bashevis Singer By Al Sundel ( Guest)



Isaac Bashevis Singer at home | Photo credit: Al Sundel

Parts of this feature about Polish-born Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer first appeared in the now-defunct Partisan Review, under the title “Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer.” The piece is written by New York-based writer Al Sundel who knew Singer personally.

Singer was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement. He believed there was still an audience who longed to read stories in Yiddish. “I would not call myself the last Yiddish writer but I am certainly one of the last,” he told The New York Times Book Review in 1972. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He died in 1991.


I first met Isaac Bashevis Singer shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above 100th Street, where the avenue starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator behind a black woman. As the door closed, her man inside put a gun to Singer’s head, speaking in dialect muddled by drugs. The woman lifted Singer’s wallet only to find a few dollars. The doper pushed the muzzle in Singer’s face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand tremored. In his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn’t have any more. It sounds comic, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize. The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling style and the elevator door closed.

The next day Singer shopped for a new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, before it became a gay zone, less than a block and a half from where John Lennon would live and be shot and killed. It was from this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider international audience for his uniquely Jewish writings. The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both a Hasid and a modern-day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people in the past. Rural Hasids were not simply second-class citizens of Poland, in the gloom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by more worldly Jews. Thus, Hasids were often not only beyond the pale in Christendom, but of mainstream Judaism.

The young Singer became a Hasidic vox populi, perhaps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yiddish. This living language was fed to the ovens, too, during the Holocaust. Once in America, the middle-age and elder Singer well knew he was writing of an obscure culture in a dying language. Yet his daily grind kept piling up more reams of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky in a language that was breathing its last. He badly needed translators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce; the money wasn’t there even to pay for indifferent ones. For beginners to translate Singer into English was akin to entry-level archaeology without boots.

Book publishers often helped with his numerous novels. But in order to move his voluminous short stories (well over 100), Singer had to draw on young admirers willing to put in the time. A friend of mine briefly took it on. He asked me to come along as he didn’t know Yiddish well and struggled with Singer’s metaphorical flights. The three of us sat close, hunched over a first-draft translation. Singer would explain what he meant by a paragraph troubling the translator. Then we took liberties to shape it into better Anglo. Multiple visits were needed to put a story to bed, while his wife Alma served coffee. As I didn’t know Yiddish and could not make all the visits necessary, I shot film and gave Singer blow-ups [enlargements of photographic images] to kind of pay my way.


Photo credit: Al Sundel


Singer was disappointed with a contact sheet from his publisher’s photographer. The man had taken him to Central Park on a wintry day in a dark coat. The shots made Singer look like a rebel priest sitting chilled on a St Stephen’s Green bench in Dublin, angry at God. Singer chose one of mine, more homey. Years later, I came upon a second photo I took of Singer that I’d given him. It appeared in the NY Times Book Review running full page with the wrong credit line and no check. I didn’t bother to complain.

Coming from a Hasidic rabbinic background, the young Singer was familiar both with the backward countryside and the booming city of Warsaw. The Hasidic movement reached its apogee in Poland in the 18th century, a time when roving Cossack armies raided defenceless Jewish villages with the vilest savagery. Why didn’t the Poles do more to stop them? Nationalistic Poles like to say that Poland is the Christ among all nations. Behind the hype stands a shameless record of Christian anti-Semitism reaching to this day (e.g., the horrors of the Jedwabne pogrom, in which half a Polish town in 1941 murdered the other half for being Jewish). Shtetl Jews were caught between the heinous crimes of Cossacks, the express hostility of Poles and the disdain of worldly Jews.

The rural Hasids formed a populist Jewish sect characterised by clannish fundamentalism, a deep strain of mysticism, and often medieval apparel. Singer chronicled the transition of the rural 17th-century Hasids, through the generations, to urban positions of wealth and power in 20th-century Warsaw. His own life would in time come to exemplify the varied transitional stages from shtetl insularity in Poland to displaced person on bustling 72nd Street off Broadway. Early on, Singer wrote in Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish. As a transitional Hasid, he obviously also spoke Polish in Warsaw. In his twenties, he knew Western culture and German well enough to translate Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun and future prize winner Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, no less) into Yiddish. English appears to be his fifth language.

Medieval times came to an end in Western Europe circa 1492. But not for much of the planet. Eastern Europe stagnated in superstition (e.g., Dracula, wolf men, fertile ground for Frankenstein, exorcist magic, sightings in the sky, etc), especially in the outlying villages. It remained ‘Brueghelian’ well into the 20th century, as large parts of the world remain today; that is, eat, drink, fornicate and be superstitious. In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto was more porous to the advances of Western culture. From Warsaw, Singer made 300-year leaps backwards to shtetls and forward again to the vims and vigours of urban intellectual life. In his shtetl stories, he juggled grassroots superstitions. He was not pushing his own occult beliefs. He was reporting what the country folk believed. In his Warsaw stories, he abandoned the supernatural and leaned more to transitional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv, Miami Beach, about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle-class lives without Cossacks, Poles or Nazis savagely attacking them.

Singer’s American stories remained at a far remove from the norms of American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration experience (cf Henry Roth), or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial Jewishness resembled the human coccyx (cf Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tailness. He wrote about displaced persons. His Jews were displaced in rural Poland, displaced in New York City, displaced in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, and especially in America, they metamorphosed. They got ‘melting-potitis.’ Singer’s characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had schlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in multiple displacements from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Judea. They had lost much of their timeline heritage along the way, except some high falutin’ parts. Though half the planet has read the Hebrew Bible, are there even 36 sages who truly understand the long view of 4,000 years of displacement? If sages could not comprehend it, what could you expect of the rest of us? Singer focused on human kitchen problems and heartaches. He tapestried 300 years of Jewish life from rural Poland to Warsaw to America almost as biblical addenda. He can be compared to a Babylonian Jew in the time of Ezra writing about centuries of exiled Jewish life in Assyria and Babylonia, only in far greater quantity than ever survived to our time.




Photo credit: Al Sundel

The sheer amount of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is beyond most people’s endurance. You look up from the writing machine to the window at times as if to say, “Hello. Is anybody out there?” Aside from two Partisan Review stalwarts who early translated a story each of his, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at Elba. He had minimal contact with fellow travellers of literary fiction. His folk past was his most trusted companion. Singer would in the end publish a lot because he wrote more than most important writers. Sometimes, as he was writing, he simultaneously conversed with his wife, a kind of soft marital babble as his fingers flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get a little giddy coming out of a writer’s self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal. He preferred to be called “Mr Singer.” He usually wore a funeral dark suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry evenings in the summer, if someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, “We will all remove our jackets.” To receive you in his shirtsleeves, he had to know you well.

He lived at the bourgeois extreme from long-haired Greenwich Village types holed up in tenements with cracked bathtubs in the kitchen from 1912. He once showed me a five-foot painting sent by a female fan. It revealed a nude in a blue-speckled field that struck an emotional high note, like Munch’s “The Scream.” Singer said he didn’t know what to do with it. He kept it facing the wall, but his eyes glittered with a stifled giggle when he showed it.

Singer took deeper pleasure in his beloved pets, yellow parakeets, who might flutter around the living room or alight on him as if he were a tree. At these times, the briefest resemblance to a St Francis kindness to animals might light up his eyes. At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He was cue-ball bald with soft white down behind the ears and ceramic-blue eyes that could shift from penetrating to waggish. He struck me as so grandfatherly, I imagined this aspect began prematurely at 45. He suggested I read Knut Hamsun, despite Hamsun’s having been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II (what good advice!).

We generally took a brisk walk to a hopping-busy cafeteria on Broadway in the 80s or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth brei, he might open up a little. Isaac Bashevis Singer had been burnt in his best years from having too much sensibility and not enough taste of life, love or money. To write a lot means to live little, to let the sun shine for others while you stay holed up in your cell. For decades, he feared he might one day grovel like Hamsun’s character in Hunger, eating his own shoe leather while a woman’s shapely image faded from the retina of his mind. His concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earning stream came from The Jewish Daily Forward, which published his briefs and fiction to an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife, Alma, held a not-so-fancy job in a department store. While he later claimed she didn’t need to work, I suspected it was just the opposite when I first met him. They were comfortable, but not yet secure.

For his first forty years, he lived in the long shadow of his brother, Isadore Joshua Singer, almost ten years older. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fiction), and he had a younger brother, Moses. I J Singer shot out of the blocks in the early ’30s to become known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vistula. He was quickly discovered by The Jewish Daily Forward, who brought him to America.

To this day, some readers prefer I J Singer to I B Singer. I J Singer was published in the US in the ’30s by Liveright and Knopf, then the two most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels about what life was really like behind ghetto and shtetl walls, tales that Sholem Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before, and a completely different kind of Hasid who shucked his medieval caftan and looked like the rest of the modern world. He wrote with bite. I J Singer spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser, an American Catholic. Both I J and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones of muted outrage. I J Singer dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and society. It is not a stretch to describe I J Singer’s vision as Tolstoyan (though he preferred Stendhal) and his talent as huge. Were he mainstream Christian instead of subset Hasid in the Jewish ghetto in anti-Semitic Poland, he would have been an overnight international sensation. Water the flower and it will grow. He was on drip irrigation.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a contradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a little toward the black humour of the regional champion, Gogol (e.g., in Gogol’s short story, “The Nose,” where a man wakes up one morning, discovers his nose missing and goes looking for it, to find it parading about the streets in the man’s cloak with a bluster of a VIP). Above all, Bashevis Singer’s fiction teemed with characters harried by the myriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life’s many spear thrusts of deceit. (A man climbs in the window of a woman late at night, convinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with her, then leaves — to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters seem to float willy-nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel’s era or today in Miami Beach? Not really. The same things happened to them, but far less brutally and superstitiously in America. Only after his death could we fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart.

Al Sundel is an author and writer based in New York. He has published six ebook novels and two non-fiction books. He has written for Partisan Review, Nation and Sewanee Review. Al has produced taped seminars on Shakespeare, Kafka and Dostoyevsky. He has also worked on a number of medical/psychiatric advertising projects for companies such as Merck, Roche and Pfizer. Al is president of Al Sundel & Associates.

Talking to Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, and Emily Dickinson

Understanding the literary world's recent obsession with communing with dead authors


Wikimedia Commons Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris envisions the ultimate creative writing program. In the film, Gil Pender, an American screenwriter and struggling novelist, travels back in time and gleans writing advice from literary luminaries living in Paris during the 1920s and the fin de siècle. Pender is a 21st-century, wannabe writer, a Hollywood hack who is awkward and uncertain in the presence of iconic figures like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. When Pender asks how he can become a "real" writer, Stein tells him to strengthen the plot of his novel. Hemingway—speaking in "clean," "honest" prose—recommends he overcome his fear of death. We never find out if Pender makes it, but many of us would prefer his experience to that of enrolling in one of America's 300 graduate writing programs: no silly workshops, no other aspiring writers, and direct instruction from "true"—i.e., deceased—masters of the craft.


The film reflects a current predilection for communing with dead authors. In movies, podcasts, books, and on the Internet, people are shunning the contemporary literary scene and seeking out writers of the past. It may be that in the digital age, the reading public has grown tired of new books and new authors and yearns for literature that is timeless and traditional. Or maybe we just need to laugh—of the recent attempts to commune with dead writers, the best do so with lightheartedness rather than solemnity.
"The Dead Authors Podcast" imagines what it would be like if H.G. Wells (played in a convincing English accent by comedian Paul Tompkins) traveled to the past on his famous time machine and returned to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles with various fellow authors, such as Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Carl Sagan, and Gertrude Stein. The podcast, which is available on iTunes, benefits 826 LA, a not-for-profit writing and tutoring center that is part of the McSweeney's-Believer literary empire. In live recordings, the authors (played by a coterie of LA-based standup talent) read from "their" work and answer questions from Wells, the audience, and the listening audience via Twitter.
The best episodes combine the banter of a David Letterman interview with the absurdity of a Saturday Night Live skit. In one show, former Conan-O'Brien-cohort Andy Richter plays Emily Dickinson. In a high-pitched voice, Richter reads Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" Wells questions Dickinson about being a sad, lonely person and tells her not to "hide her light under a bushel." He asks about her literary influences, to which Dickinson responds, "Oh, Emerson, Blake ... but mostly me."
Like Midnight in Paris, much of the humor of "The Dead Authors Podcast" arises out of anachronisms. For instance, Dickinson doesn't understand bottled water and is appalled to learn that her private poems were published after her death. The list of books that science-fiction writer Carl Sagan (played by Matt Gourley) wishes he'd written include Eat, Pray, Love and The Help.

Dr. Seuss's Little-Known Book of Nudes The humor also comes from poking fun at famous authors' personality quirks. Scott Aukerman's Ben Franklin is reminiscent of the Big Lebowski. John Ross Bowie presents Gertrude Stein as a trickster well aware of the literary shell game she plays with her readers. Marc Even Jackson portrays O. Henry as a drunk, somber writer who is only capable of writing short stories "with a twist!" Hal Lubin personates Dickens as a self-absorbed author who talks incessantly about "the poor!"

Episodes of "The Dead Authors Podcasts" only fall flat when they attempt to represent an author too earnestly. For instance, the show with Dorothy Parker (played the wry and witty Jen Kirkman) doesn't lampoon Parker so much as portray her as the drunk, bitter woman she sometimes was. Jabs at Parker's drinking and her complicated relationship with her husband come across as mean-spirited rather than playful.
And playful should be the point. When these conversations pop up in more serious arenas, the effects are troubling. In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, a new anthology from University of Iowa Press, writers and critics conjure up sober exchanges with past authors. Each of the contributors was given the same prompt: If you could sit down with an author who has preoccupied, influenced, or troubled you, what would you ask? Most of the essays imagine thoughtful interactions with writers like Samuel Beckett and George Orwell; yet somehow, they resemble silly parlor games more than meaningful journeys to the Underworld. When Cynthia Ozick confronts Henry James about his sexuality it feels embarrassing rather than funny or witty. Twenty-first century ideas do little to enhance 19th-century personalities like James. The highlights of AfterWordinclude Margaret Atwood's essay on negotiating with the dead and Jay Parini in conversation with Robert Frost. Parini has experience resurrecting the dead. He penned the final days of Leo Tolstoy in his novel The Last Station: a Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year. One wishes that Afterword editor Dale Salwak had asked seasoned biographical novelists such as David Lodge and Colm Toíbín to contribute. Like Parini, Lodge and Toíbín understand the risks involved in writing a serious account of a literary master.
The too-serious problem also arises in White Crow Books's Conversations series. Simon Parke, an ex-priest in the Church of England, imagines conversations with Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, drawing on letters, books, and essays for the authors' responses. (Parke also enacts conversations with Vincent Van Gogh, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Meister Eckhart, and, yes, Jesus.) Parke writes that the series allows us to "meet the people for ourselves," but the results are tedious. The reality is that we will never know Tolstoy or Conan Doyle and are therefore limited to our vague impressions of the people behind the work. The beauty of never knowing our literary idols is that it prevents us from "figuring out" a novella like The Kreutzer Sonata and reducing it to mere themes and symbols.

Yet if YouTube is any indication, the conversations-with-dead-authors phenomenon has become a way for elementary and high schools to do just that. In these clips, one student typically dresses up as an author while the other assumes the role of the interviewer. The students then enact a "conversation" that includes facts from the author's biography and banal explanations of the author's work. The results are mixed. In one clip, Walt Whitman plays a Nirvana riff on a guitar:

In another, a student playing Mark Twain with a makeshift cotton-ball beard actually reads from Roughing It.

Many of the students attempt to imitate Oprah and more often than not they ask what a poem or story or novel is about. Most are trying to get credit for completing a school project without taking it too seriously. But how many points are these students given for understanding the ridiculousness of what they've been asked to do and how many for correctly expressing the "theme" of Walt Whitman's "This Compost"?
Perhaps we should take our cues from the makers of The Muppet Show, which—way back in 1979—understood the absurdity of acting out a fictional interview with a dead writer. In one episode, Sam the Eagle speaks to a Muppet he thinks is William Shakespeare. "Are you the William Shakespeare?" Sam the Eagle asks. When the Muppet says he is, Sam the Eagle tells him how much he loved The Sound of Music. The Swedish Chef reads Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" speech. Laughter ensues.

Book Reviews: A Tortured History

 
 
 
 
 

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• SARAH FAY
 
•  APR 25, 2012
 
•  CULTURE

Why do lovers of literature take such joy in criticizing the critics?

Falconia/Shutterstock

Lamenting the state of the book review has been the literary world's favorite pastime ever since Edgar Allan Poe reviewed for Graham's Magazine in the 1840s. From Henry James to Heidi Julavitis, writers seem to delight in publishing manifestos that outline the book review's shortcomings and inadequacies.

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One popular complaint is that book reviews are merely a byproduct of the publishing industry and therefore stink of mediocrity, elitism, nepotism, or all three. In 1846, Poe wrote that book reviews (and the publishing industry) were a sham and riddled with nepotism: "We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright." In 1917, H.L. Mencken bemoaned the "inconceivable complacency and conformity" of journalistic criticism. Forty years later, Elizabeth Hardwick echoed these sentiments when she said of reviewing, "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns."
Another criticism is that book reviews lack intelligence. In 1891, Henry James, the ultimate aesthete, complained that we publish too many reviews and none of value. Reviewing, James wrote, was all presumption and chatter and lacked "concrete literary fact"—that is specific references to and examples from the work reviewed. In his 1928 essay "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," Edmund Wilson wrote nearly the same thing: "It is astonishing to observe, in America, in spite of our floods of literary journalism, to what extent the literary atmosphere is a non-conductor of criticism." This line of criticism continues today: In 2007, Steve Wasserman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers."

A recent trend amongst literary hipsters (and aging literary hipsters) is to whine that reviews are "too mean." This strand of book-review-griping emphasizes the need to protect and support "the artist." In 2005, the literary magazine N+1protested against reviews published in The New Republic for being wholly negative. In 2001, Zadie Smith, formerly the New Books columnist for Harper'smagazine, published a response to critic James Wood's a review of White Teeth inThe Guardian, entitled "This is how it feels to be me". In it, she asked critics to behave "more like teachers": "I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice." In a manic 2005 article on the "Teflon age of criticism," Heidi Julavitis veered off on many tangents—including a hagiography of the New York Intellectuals, a recap of the James Wood-Zadie Smith smackdown, a bit about movies and television, a defense of workshop fiction, an attack on anti-intellectualism, an awkward confession about her "intellectual crush" on James Wood (an anti-intellectual move in and of itself), and a declaration of her belief in literature's "intrinsic value"—before concluding that book reviews should never be mean and never, ever be "snarky."
But the problem with book reviews is not that they reek of mediocrity, elitism, or nepotism; aren't smart enough or are too pretentious; or are too negative or too positive. It's that they come from a source—a human being—and we sometimes fail to take that into account.
The other issue is that these sources aren't necessarily "experts" in the field of literature. Fiction and poetry reviews usually aren't written by literature professors or scholars; instead, they're written by freelance writers or columnists, some who are qualified and some who are not.

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But what makes someone qualified to review contemporary poetry and fiction? Contrary to what many people may think, these qualities aren't elusive or innate. In fact, the talents and abilities that a reviewer of poetry and fiction should possess are reflected in the techniques of some of our finest (deceased) journalistic literary critics from the past two hundred years: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and John Updike. None of these critics was "classically" trained in academe. Fuller was a populist and a Romantic in the German tradition who signed her reviews anonymously with an asterisk and believed that her purpose as literary editor of The New York Herald Tribune in the early 1840s was to promote reading as a form of self-culture and self-knowledge. Poe, the consummate outsider/insider, saw his reviews and his column in "The Literati of New York City" published in Godey's Lady's Book as an opportunity to expose the nepotism that was as rampant in the American publishing industry in the early 19th century as it is today. (The column's subtitle was "Honest Opinions at Random Respecting their Autorial Merits, With Occasional Words of Personality.")

In the early 20th century, H.L. Mencken, editor of The Smart Set and American Mercury, despised the academic penchant for "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism." He rose out of the smoke-filled dens of Baltimore newspapers and wrote book reviews that were all style and gusto. He attacked some books and advocated others. Mencken was salty, iconoclastic, and surprisingly blithe. (The New Critics would later pooh-pooh his refusal to take literature seriously.) The purpose of Mencken's reviews was as much to make an impression on the reader as it was to evaluate the book under discussion.
Edmund Wilson, who served alternately as a literary journalist or editor for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, reiterated James's criticisms of book reviews. He was against the schools of criticism but wrote historical reviews that analyzed and contextualized a work. Wilson set out to reveal the inner workings of a book and place it within literary history.
Elizabeth Hardwick approached criticism as a creative endeavor, a necessary complement to the world of art. In a 1985 interview published in The Paris Review, she said, "...[I]n reading books and planning to write about them, or maybe just in reading certain books, you begin to see all sorts of not quite expressed things the author may not have been entirely conscious of. It's a sort of creative or 'possessed' reading." In her reviews, Hardwick could be "snippy," but she was also loyal to the text and always dignified. She described book reviewing as "a natural response to the existence in the world of works of art. It is an honorable and even an exalted endeavor. Without it, works of art would appear in a vacuum, as if they had no relation to the minds experiencing them."
In general, John Updike favored the nice-guy approach to book reviewing, one that favored and coddled the author and limited the reviewer. He had a set of standards—his "rules" of reviewing—that clearly arose out of his experiences as an oft-reviewed author. They go something like this: 1) don't review books you have any personal connection to; 2) quote the book; 3) quote the book; 4) no spoilers; 5) quote the book; 6) review the book, not the author's reputation; 7) praise unsparingly; 8) leave tradition, schools of criticism, and political/social ideas out of it; 9) remember that books are meant to be enjoyed, 10) quote the book.
There are other journalistic literary critics—Van Wyck Brooks, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Cyril Connolly, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, and so many more—with insights and approaches worth studying. This is just a start. As we look to past book reviewers, we must also look around us. Too few newspapers and magazines employ regular book columnists and reviewers. This is done in the spirit of egalitarianism, but in the digital age, where anonymous, poorly written "customer reviews" sway readers, we need to establish relationships with our literary critics. We need to trust them as "experts" hired and trained by the publications that employ them or self-educated and trained as book bloggers or "amateur" reviewers with websites of their own. In either case, we can get to know the reviewer's tastes and tics and make a more informed decision about the book under review. In the present, mosh-pit of book reviewing, it's nearly impossible to know where the freelance literary critic you're reading is coming from. Including, perhaps, this one.