The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos FuentesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Monday, June 29, 2020
Review: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin TaylorMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Sometimes at a funeral there will be that person whose central place confuses you. You’ll recognize the surviving spouse, siblings, and children, but then there will sometimes be that mysterious friend who’s given the same standing. Sometimes that person, recognizing the potential discomfort that comes with being elevated beyond other mourners, will be considerate enough to explain the backstory. Other times, the person stands presumptuously, implicitly blaming you for not recognizing the special nature of the friendship.
Benjamin Taylor is presumptuous here. He puts himself forward as a chief mourner of the great Philip Roth, and he takes it for granted that his memories of their friendship are a balm to those many of us who have mourned him after knowing him only from a distance.
Not long ago, I read and enjoyed James Atlas’s Remembering Roth – another of the short memoir/biographies of Roth that we are getting as we await the promised seminal biography from Blake Bailey. In it, Atlas told the story of how he’d been swept into Roth’s circle the way a lot of people were. Roth would find something to admire in a younger writer’s work, would send a note, and then their friendship would erupt.
Just as often, though, as Atlas tells it (and as others suggest), Roth would grow prickly and distant. He didn’t write such people out of his life, but he’d let a friendship lose its luster. Atlas is especially good at recording the slow-growing sadness of realizing that he was getting pushed out of an inner circle he’d been fortunate to be part of for a decade or so. There was always someone new, someone full of promise and without baggage to fill the vacated place.
Taylor, it turns out, was more or less the last man standing when Roth died. I understand there were others – Adam Gopnik was a famous late-life intimate – but, as we get the story here, Taylor is the central one.
And, whether that claim is true, his descriptions of it are almost cringe-worthy. On the last page – though it’s hardly the first time he says something so self-serving – he records saying to Roth, “You have been the joy of my life.” And then he quotes Roth’s answer, “And you of mine.” I’ll believe Roth said it, and I’ll believe he meant it. But I won’t believe he never said it to anyone else, and I won’t believe he’d have looked at his life differently a week before or a week after. We know enough about Roth’s mercurial moods to know that much of his power came from living within such moments.
As such, it’s an awkward and uncomfortable experience to have Taylor record such sentiments without putting them into a larger context. He never tells the story of his friendship with Roth; he merely basks in it. And that leaves the rest of us feeling like excluded mourners.
I could forgive some of that awkward tone if there were more substance or more new information here.
To Taylor’s partial credit, we do learn (for what I think may be the first time) that Roth did indeed continue writing after he stopped publishing. He has volumes of late-life material that some publisher will likely release some day. We also get some brief snippets of Roth’s private correspondence with Taylor, and some of the lines are genuinely memorable. One, for instance, is Roth’s observation, “Hawthorne, that visionary pessimist, had it right: Our enemies are forever the legions of purifiers and pleasure-haters.”
And then there’s Roth’s reported claim that he slept with Ava Gardner sometime in the 1980s. Here’s how Taylor records that in what may be the most uncomfortable moment in a short book filled with them. “ ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis? You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the eighties. When I had her.’ (I tell you this, reader, in strict confidence – as it was told to me.)”
As for substance, Taylor seems a solid reader of Roth though not an extraordinary one. He offers quick critical observations every now and then, but he rarely explores or supports them. One of my favorites, and potentially the most substantive claim in the book, turns on how Roth – who could not bring himself to believe in an afterlife – dealt with what it means to lose somebody, and to be lost oneself. As Taylor puts it, “Philip’s solution was to rename mortality and declare himself indestructible till death. It’s not a bad gloss on what’s always been the ultimate human problem.”
That kernel of insight might have served as the heart of a worthwhile book here. I’d have wanted to see Taylor slow down, give context to, and reflect on Roth’s fading years.
Instead, we’ve gotten something that awkwardly celebrates a friendship that, as it might have meant a lot to Roth and surely did to Taylor, doesn’t really concern itself with those of us who had our own readerly relationship to the man.
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Saturday, June 27, 2020
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Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Review: 1876
1876 by Gore VidalMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In this, the third of the Annals of America novels, Vidal comes to assert something he merely suggests as a possibility in the early ones: protagonist Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler is the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. I like that detail, but I love what it does to the series as a whole. This alternative to the conventional American history really is a kind of bastard perspective.
At a broad level, the series takes us back to moments of American history that we think we know and then reimagines them. In the first, Burr, we get Charlie’s favorable impressions of the most maligned of the major “Founding Fathers.” In the second, we see Abraham Lincoln not as an idealist but as a pragmatist dragged into the Civil War almost against his will.
In each separate novel we see members of the extended Schuyler family, which means in one way that we are seeing an America in which Aaron Burr continues to make his mark. It’s a little like Vidal himself, scion of a family that has had political power for generations, watching from the outside and complaining that he no longer gets to assert his own truth.
With that, Vidal is still funny in an airy way. One of my favorite running jokes is that Charlie doesn’t think much of Mark Twain, regarding his just released Tom Sawyer as a come-down from his earlier work. Another is the great one-liner describing a young man he meets, “He was like the handsome son I never had, nor wanted.” That is, we sometimes get his admission that this alternative perspective isn’t necessarily a better one.
Still, the topic of the 1876 Presidential election is a tricky one. On the one hand, we get the chance to examine what was perhaps the most closely contested vote in American history. I hadn’t realized it, but Democrat Samuel Tilden is still the only person to win a majority of the popular vote and still lose the election. (I had to check, but Hillary Clinton won somewhat less than 50 percent even though she beat the current President by a well-documented wide margin.) Charlie desperately wants Tilden to win because he sees it as his way to get appointed to a ministership abroad.
On the other, this is an alternative history to…what, exactly? This is a chapter in American history that most of us have forgotten. It’s good to be exposed to it, I suppose, but it makes the corrective/alternative perspective harder to employ. I couldn’t follow what was happening because I didn’t know the history against which this version is set.
To make it worse, the ‘drama’ of this episode takes place in an extended set of election returns. There’s no real climax; it’s just the outcome of electoral votes from Oregon and Florida. And there’s not much happening in Charlie’s own life. His daughter plans to marry, but she makes those arrangements largely away from him. The personal drama taking place there happens outside our point-of-view. We get caught up on it, but the effect is as attenuated as the slow election returns.
As someone who has read this much of the series largely because I keep finding the volumes on sale, I still admire the overall project. This one is intriguing within that larger structure, but it doesn’t hold up too well on its own. I would like to see how Vidal reimagines later episodes in history, and I look forward to how he weaves the Schuyler family into it. So maybe I will keep going with this series.
In this volume, though, he looks back to an election that made clear the extent to which corruption has shaped who we are as a people. Right now, of all times, that’s an easy lesson to remember.
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