The Writing Life
Some writers are born for the novel. Others for the memoir or criticism. Consider the case of Margaret Ethel Jameson, who wrote 45 mediocre novels but had a gift for autobiography:
A reader’s report on her first novel declares: ‘It is loosely constructed; starts nowhere; ends nowhere; characters many and ill-defined. They do not live; they are vehicles for the author’s theories and the expounding of his theme.’ Nevertheless, the reader concludes (never imagining that Storm could be a woman’s name), ‘the man can write and is worth watching.’
Between the Twenties and the Sixties, Jameson achieved a more than respectable reputation as what, then as now, would be called a midlist writer of prodigious output. Her books sold well, she had many fans, publication was always assured, and in London she knew ‘everyone.’ Yet nearly all of Jameson’s novels might well have come in for much the same assessment of that early reader’s report—that they are primarily devoted to creating characters who are set in motion for the sake of exploring a social or political thesis: modern marriage seen from a woman’s disadvantaged perspective, the postwar experience of an embittered generation in the Twenties, liberalism in crisis during the Thirties, fascism at home in the Forties, and, of course, tale after tale of murderously indifferent industrialists with a boot on the neck of disempowered workers, observed or interfered with by various progressive types.
The rise of fascism was especially compelling and, like many other writers on the left, Jameson justified the kind of writing she felt driven to produce in the run-up to the Second World War: ‘The impulse that turned so many of us into pamphleteers and amateur politicians was neither mean nor trivial. I doubt whether any of us believed that books would be burned in England [or people] tortured and then killed in concentration camps. But all these things were happening abroad and intellectuals who refused to protest were in effect blacklegs. [That is, scabs.]’
It wasn’t that she couldn’t write well—she could and did—but, forever in thrall to a thesis, her characters, in the main, not only fail to come alive on the page but hector the reader as well. In Company Parade—a novel based on the experience of the young Storm Jameson in interwar London—the protagonist, a self-styled socialist thrilled to have just published a popular novel, is chastised by another character, a full-blown radical: ‘Don’t you know you haven’t any right to write novels unless you put in’ the city’s slums, capitalism’s treachery, society’s ruthless indifference? ‘Whether you know it or not, you’re being used. . . . You’re persuading [people] that all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ Imagine this kind of writing sprinkled through or even dominating the narrative of some thirty or forty novels!
Jameson knew her shortcomings. She understood very well what it meant to dig deep into the inner life of a character, and did not cry foul when, halfway through her career, a friend told her bluntly. ‘You know far too much about human nature and too little about making what you know palatable. You don’t give your imagination room to breathe, you dissect, and you write too many books too quickly.’ However, here she stood and she could do no other.
In other news: Here’s an update on the effort to restore Notre Dame’s Grand Organ: “Twenty months after a devastating fire broke out at Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Paris church’s ‘voice’—otherwise known as its Grand Organ—is finally healing. This week, reports Anna Sansom for the Art Newspaper, workers finished disassembling portions of the Gothic landmark’s historic organ ahead of a major restoration project.”
A painting in the town hall of a Belgian municipality has been identified as the work of an “Old Master”: “The painting has been hanging on the wall in the office of the Alderman responsible for town planning since the 1960’s. Prior to that it was on display in a municipal museum. The painting was given to the municipality of Sint-Gillis by an art collector in 1915. It had been valued by art experts on several occasions, but they had always said that the painting was a copy or the work of one of the Flemish master’s followers. It was the art historian Constantin Pion that discovered the painting is genuine.”
“Unlike the sciences, the arts do not march to the drum of progress. Art instead goes through high and low periods.” We’re in a low period now, says Joseph Epstein.
The latest contribution to the “Poetry and News” conversation hosted by the Theopolis Institute is Aaron Belz writing in defense of Ezra Pound: “I deeply appreciate the thoroughgoing nature of James Matthew Wilson’s essay, but this sentence took me off guard: ‘While there is much warmed-over Victorian lyricism in [Ezra Pound’s Cantos], and such passages, in fact, account for almost all its memorable lines, the greater bulk of it consists of unreadable or barely readable passages meant to serve as what Pound called “luminous details.”’ No doubt Pound emerges most immediately from Victorian Poetry’s coattails, especially those of Browning and Rossetti. Yet perusing these 818 pages, what I find is neither warmed-over, nor Victorian—nor even lyricism. The Cantos, to my reading, comprise narrative fragments, bits of dialog, maxims, inscriptions, passages in Italian, Latin, Greek, sea chanties, wordplay, repetition, concrete poetry, and maybe the first appearance of the term ‘bro’ in any poem (at the beginning of LXIV).”
Knopf has named John Freeman as its new executive editor: “John Freeman, most recently the Executive Editor of Lit Hub and the former editor of Granta, has joined Knopf as an Executive Editor, effective March 15 . . . In addition to Lit Hub and Granta, Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a literary annual published in several countries around the world.”
Daniel J. Mahoney reviews Pierre Manent’s Montaigne: Life without Law: “The distinguished contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent has spent four decades chronicling the development of modern self-consciousness, including the flight from human nature and ‘the moral contents of life’ that define modern self-understanding in its most radical forms. Manent’s work combines penetrating analyses of great works of political, philosophical, and religious reflection with judicious independent thought. In both, he illumines the interpenetration of politics and the things of the soul. That dialectical melding of politics and soul permanently defines the human condition, even in the most remote times and climes. Manent continues that work with learning and grace in Montaigne: Life without Law.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Jeff Hobbs’s Show Them You’re Good: “The essayist Caitlin Flanagan once sought to explain why American adolescents seemed so attracted to the Hunger Games novels, which pit teenagers in a dystopian land against one another in a series of competitions-to-the-death to allow their families to survive. The series, she wrote, is ‘macabre and gory, and it describes a world of extreme physical privation, which is always of deep interest to children. But it also suggests that a teenager is capable of making a real contribution to others using only her wits, and sometimes nothing more than the simple, physical fact of her existence.’ Compare that, Flanagan suggested, with the coming-of-age challenge that most American teenagers undergo—college admissions. ‘They are hobbled and childlike, deeply dependent on the parents who make their participation in the various belt-notching exercises possible,’ she explained. ‘What they are really prepared to do, at the end of all this, is only one thing: to replicate the society that has created them. It’s a closed system of test-takers and French horn players.’ If it seems that the 17- and 18-year-old Los Angeles boys profiled in Jeff Hobbs’s Show Them You’re Good are adrift, that’s at least in part because they are looking for a test to see whether they are ready for adulthood—and college admissions do not feel like a ‘real contribution.’ Whether they are wealthy or poor, Hispanic or white, from stable families or chaotic ones, the boys here seem to be looking for ways to prove themselves but find themselves floundering in the strange expectations of their parents and teachers. At a time of life when earlier generations of young men might have been helping to support a family or even defend their country, these boys are preparing for the SATs or writing personal essays or engaged in mock-trial competitions. And the sense that both this process and the prizes that ostensibly wait for them are trivial strikes them all at some point.”
