Music For A Late-Night Cigar

The rather stern-looking guy in the photo to the left is not Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of 12-tone music, but his younger disciple, composer Anton Webern. If you don't know who he is, you will in a moment. For those who have read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (all six of you) the death of Webern, shot by a trigger-happy American GI when he stepped outside to have a cigarette after dinner in the spring of 1945, is a key episode in that novel. And it happened for real.

But to understand what the heck I'm about to talk about, you have to know who Arnold Schoenberg was, and Webern too. They were partners in a particularly significant cultural enterprise.

I'm going to put up the caveat here that I usually add to my blog when I'm writing about baseball: non-baseball fans are excused. And if you have no musical training and no understanding of, or interest in, the meaning of the term, "12-tone," you are similarly excused.

I'm regularly in the habit of smoking a cigar in my library before turning in at night. And my evening smoke is almost always accompanied by music. I've found that certain kinds of music are best at certain times of day. For instance, before 9 a.m. I don't want to hear anything from the Romantic period. It's just too damn noisy. From dawn to about the time the breakfast dishes are done, all I want to hear is stuff from between about 1590 and about 1800. Monteverdi. Dowland. Telemann.

Late night is the best time for music of an intimate nature, by which I mean music for small enembles which requires you to pay attention. The kind of music that cannot be background noise. Beethoven's late string quartets never sound better to me than they do after 11 p.m.

Lately I've been listening to music of the so-called Second Viennese School over my last cigar of the day. Or I should say, the Second Viennese School and its adherents. I mean of course, atonal or 12-tone music. Now, I'm not crazy about this kind of music as a rule, and yes, there is a sort of eat-your-vegetables thing going here; 12-tone reigned supreme for most of the 20th century. To simply ignore it would be like trying to pretend that T.S. Eliot never wrote, even if Eliot isn't your cup of tea, and he's seldom mine.

So. For the past few nights I've been listening to stuff like Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto; Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.

Now, I'm going to assume that anyone who's still reading at this point already knows what all of this music is about and doesn't need it explained. So I'm not going to go into trying to explain dodecaphony. Besides, I'm a non-musician myself and not really qualified to explain it. If you put a page of sheet music in front of me, I can point out the treble and bass clefs; the leger lines, the whole note, the half note, the quarter note and the symbols for sharp and flat. But as far as looking at it and hearing something in my head, forget it. I sang bass in the choir when I was in high school, and I once took a few guitar lessons but had to drop them when my money ran out. That's the extent of my musical training. My only qualifications for talking about music are a lifetime of listening to it and reading about it. I think I'm the only person I know who has watched Leonard Bernstein's 1973 series of lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question all the way through at least six times on VHS over the years.

But for those who would like a thumbnail explanation of what I'm talking about, 12-tone or dodecaphonic music emerged before, during and after World War I. A group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, most of them Austro-Germanic (hence, "Second Viennese School") decided to dispense with the whole idea of writing in keys. 12-tone music is constructed using "rows" instead of keys, a "tone row" being a certain arrangement and/or permutation of the 12 tones in the chromatic scale.

Atonal or 12-tone music has a distinctly weird, interplanetary sound to people who have never heard it before. Because there are no keys, there are no "tunes" as we understand them, unless like Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto, you snitch a tune from Bach or someone else and work it in there somewhere. Because 12-tone music dispenses with keys, it also pretty much dispenses with the whole idea of melody. That means you have to listen for something else when you're listening to it, which gets me back to that business about late night being best for intimate music, which I consider 12-tone to be, because it really taxes your attention. You have to pay attention if you're going to get anything out of it at all; it's not going to come and caress your ear with Che gelida manina.

To put it bluntly, to the uninitiated 12-tone sounds like so much random banging, honking and screeching. I know, because that's what it sounded like to me when I first heard it.

Serialism (so called because a 12-tone row is also called a "series")as I said, held sway in musical circles for practically the entire 20th century. For a generation or so between the 1920s and the end of World War II, there was something of a split in the classical music world between Schoenberg, Webern and Berg's followers, who were all writing atonal and serial music, and followers of Igor Stravinsky, who resisted the new style until after Schoenberg's death in 1951. Rather than abandoning tonality, e.g. the idea of writing in keys, Stravinsky kept it alive by applying one innovative twist after another to it, in works as varied as Le histoire du Soldat, Oedipus Rex and the Symphony in C.

But once Schoenberg was in his grave, Stravinsky came around to dodecaphony. Some think he was led to it by his long-time friend and amaneunsis, conductor Robert Craft, a passionate exponent of serialism. But that argument is for another day. In the 1950s and up to his death in 1971, Stravinsky was turning out works like Monumentum pro Gesualdo, The Flood, and Requiem Canticles, all of which embraced the 12-tone method.

One of the problems I have with 12-tone music is that it's so complicated and theory-driven that a composer must have a powerful personality to make any personal imprint on it. Stravinsky certainly did, and even his 12-tone pieces still sound like Stravinsky. Webern, too, is distinct in his use of the style; his music is very spare, most of his pieces fleetingly short and heavy on exploitation of various timbres. Stravinsky admired Webern, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Stravinsky's late pieces, the 12-tone works, sound more like Webern than they do like Schoenberg. Stravinsky was always distinct in his use of rhythm, and like Webern he was interested in exploring different timbres. For example he described a passage in his Orchestra Variations of 1965, (which by the way, were dedicated to the memory of T.S. Eliot) as sounding like broken glass being ground up.

But Bernstein made the point in his lectures at Harvard on Schoenberg and Stravinsky respectively that the 12-tone method made it possible for almost anyone, by memorizing a few rules, to come up with a presentable piece of music. My take on that remark is that dodecaphony lends itself to mediocrity very easily, and an awful lot of it sounds like all the rest of it. Schoenberg certainly had a strong musical personality, and when I listened for the first time to the Maurizio Pollini recording of his Piano Concerto, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan back in New York that it seemed to me as if, but for the lack of a key signature, this piece could be Brahms. Charlie more or less nodded in assent. Well, Schoenberg was famous for being a "conservative radical." He gave up tonality reluctantly, developing the new 12-tone method with relentless Germanic logic in response to the problems posed by Wagner's famous "Tristan chord" and what came after it.

That problem arose from the simple fact that the Romantics, from Chopin to Wagner, had experimented so thoroughly with chromaticism, that is, making their music wander far and wide from the traditional dialogue between the tonic and dominant keys, that they had pushed it to the snapping point. Composers like Gustav Mahler, Max Reger and Hans Pfitzner had stretched chromatic expression so far that Schoenberg decided it could no longer be contained within a tonal framework, and did what seemed to him the logical thing: he threw the key signature out and started over.

Then World War II came along and he moved to America.

America has always been culturally somewhat in thrall to Europe, and American composers embraced the Schoenbergian method with both arms. Some big names resisted; Aaron Copland held out for a while, but eventually even he started experimenting with The Method.

In no time, 12-tone music was the thing to do on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe had spoken. For the entire second half of the 20th century, dodecaphony held unchallengeable sway in the university music departments of the United States. You either wrote serial music or you were a reactionary and a fuddy-duddy.

And this is where our old friend irony steps into the picture. There are certain parallels between serialism and Marxism. For one thing, as Bernstein pointed out at Harvard, according to Schoenberg's rules (which were meant to be broken of course) in the construction of a 12-tone row, no one note can be repeated until the other 11 have sounded. And if a note is especially high or low, it can't be held for a long time because its position as high or low gives it a more prominent place than the other 11 tones, just as would being repeated. In other words, the method creates a complete tonal "democracy" if you define democracy as preventing any one individual from having any more or being any more important than any other individual.

That sounds to me like the way Marxism defines democracy, or at least the way Marxist regimes traditionally described themselves when calling themselves "democratic republics."

I don't think there is any coincidence in the fact that 12-tone music took over the university music departments at the same time that the political science departments were giving themselves over to Herbert Marcuse. There is something about serialism that inspires the dogmatic approach, and of course you can say the same thing about Marx. Marxists were forever accusing each other of apostasy, and any composer right up to John Corigliano who dared to deviate from the righteous path of Schoenberg would immediately suffer the ostracism of not being taken seriously, in much the same way that poets who persist in using meter are not taken seriously in English departments today.

How ironic then, that the country which tried to lead the world down the path to Marxism for 74 years, the Soviet Union, had a strict rule against Schoenberg and his method. In the USSR, of course, the problem was that everything from chalk to cheese was dictated from the Kremlin, and of the command-givers in the Kremlin, starting with Stalin, you could charitably say that when it came to music, as with architecture and so many other things, all their taste was in their mouths. Stalin was about as musical as a hedgehog, but he told Soviet composers what kind of music they had to write, as did his successors. And they stuck to a strict rule: what they called "formalism," by which they meant music that stressed form over content, was forbidden. There were Soviet composers with enough genius to work around this rule and still create great music. Shostakovich and Prokofiev are the first two that come to mind.

But in my youth, Shostakovich was not taken seriously in the United States. 12-tone music was so firmly in the saddle in American musical circles that composers and musicians looked down their noses at Shostakovich as being at best hopelessly old-fashioned, and at worst a Kremlin toady doing the bidding of his masters. It wasn't until Solomon Volkov published Testimony, a memoir purported to have been dictated by Shostakovich himself, that his stock in the west began to rise. Testimony showed Shostakovich to have detested Stalin and everything he stood for, and to have bridled under the way the Soviet regime made him live his life as a musician.

When Shostakovich died in 1975, Testimony had not yet been published and 12-tone was still king. But a few dissenting voices were beginning to whisper by the time the 1980s rolled around. Some in the musical community began pointing out that 12-tone music, while it might have solved a problem for fin-de-siecle Vienna and Europe generally, had little if anything to do with the American experience. Some also began looking at their watches and pointing out that 12-tone had now had 75 years or so to find an audience, and had yet to do so anywhere outside of universities and at festivals of "new music" attended mainly by composers and musicians and hardly at all by the public.

The public, generally, just didn't like 12-tone, and was getting tired of being hectored about eating its vegetables. The academy, predictably, labeled the public as dunderheads and philistines who just wanted to hear the same Tchaikovsky pablum over and over, and went about its business like the cultural priesthood it saw itself to be. One thinks of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier telling the American financiers who were paying for the buildings they designed to just shut up and pay the bills. "We'll tell you when it's done. Write us a check and then leave us alone." The musical intelligentsia had a similar attitude.

But by the 1990s, (interestingly, concomitant with the collapse of the Soviet bloc) tonality began to reassert itself in ever-bolder voices, and the cries of "Philistine" from academia began to grow somewhat fainter. Composers from the former Soviet empire such as Lithuanian Arvo Paert were writing music that was shamelessly tonal, as were John Tavener in England, Corigliano in the United States and plenty of others. Aaron Jay Kernis, a New York-based composer who attended The San Francisco Conservatory in the 1970s with my friend Berigan, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1998 with a piece so tonal that Charlie told me it sounded like Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade.

What can be said for that? Well, from my standpoint it's a big plus if you can hear a piece of music and actually recognize it without having to stop and get out the book or read the jewel box notes. And that's my biggest problem during these late night vigils with Schoenberg, Webern and company. I enjoy their music, but more as sound than as music. Sure, it's interesting to try and follow what they do with orchestration, dynamics and timbre, but the music all sounds so much the same that I can only take it in helpings and then I want to go back to my set of Brandenburg Concertos. I have listened to Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto maybe a dozen times, and every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. It's that forgettable. And it sounds like every other 12-tone piece I've ever heard. If I didn't know it was by Kirschner, I wouldn't know it was by Kirschner. On the other hand, I can hear a passage of Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Bruckner and immediately know who the composer is even if I don't know the piece. I'll leave it to one of my musician friends to explain that to me, but it's the truth.

Tonight I might give Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande a try. It's an early work, written before he went "over the edge" tonally with the op. 11 piano pieces that proclaimed the arrival of atonality in 1908. But this is 2008, 100 years later. And I think tomorrow night I'm going back to Beethoven quartets. I ate my vegetables. Bring on dessert.

What The Dickens Is Going On?

Okay, everybody. The election is over. Even the shouting is over. It's time to turn our attention back to the things in life that are truly important.

Old books that nobody reads any more. Yeah!

What follows is actually two entries from my offline journal, both of which date from the fall of 2003. Their subject: getting in touch with Charles Dickens. I kid you not.

If books mean nothing to you, don't bother with this. On the other hand, if you're as passionate about them as I am, there might be food here for lively debate between you and me, whoever you might be...

From Kelley's Journal, November, 2003:

I

Sometimes a confluence of events comes along and pokes me. It has happened now and then throughout my life. They don’t have to be big events, like the loss of a job followed by the failure to find another, followed by a car trip across America. They can be small events, like the reading of an essay following upon the heels of a conversation, followed by the rediscovery of an old, familiar volume. That, in fact, is what just happened, and as a result I feel that my life as a reader has been, in some small way, kick-started. In any case I am reading again, in a tentative way, but throwing tentativeness to the breeze, have undertaken a formidable project in that area: Little Dorrit.

Little Dorrit? Yeah. For most of my adult life, indeed, for most of my life as a reader, I have had an allergy to the Victorians. All that windiness, all that length, all that prudery, hypocrisy, imperial smugness. Who needed it? Twenty-some years ago, Ray Araiza used to tease me about my proud claim that “I don’t read the Victorians.” Hemingway and his generation had fought the good fight to liberate American literature from the stranglehold of Britannia. I was their heir, or so I thought. What did I need with Dickens, Thackeray and company?

Well, the journey to Little Dorrit actually had its earliest beginning in September, 2001. Tatiana Floyd and I were driving from Baltimore to Boston for the Labor Day weekend. We took along with us some books on tape to listen to in the car, one of which was a collection of short pieces by Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up. One of the essays on that tape concerned the brouhaha which followed the publication in 1998 of Wolfe’s novel A Man In Full. Specifically, the fuss that three famous, and jealous, fellow-writers kicked up over its success. Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving all went on television at different times to trash A Man In Full, Mailer claiming that it was “journalism” and not fiction, (he ought to know about that!) and Updike stuffily asserting that it wasn’t a product of “our” literary culture. But John Irving outdid his two fellow sniffers: in an appearance on Canadian TV, the jealous author so lost control of himself on the subject of A Man In Full that he was liberally using the “F” word. And here’s the rub in the case of Irving’s on-the-air tantrum: Wolfe mentioned that some reviewers of A Man In Full had compared it with Dickens, and that was what really got Irving’s goat: Irving, it seems, is a great admirer of Dickens, who would like to be compared with Dickens himself. To see Wolfe compared with Dickens drove John Irving into “F-word” convulsions in a TV interview.

This intrigued me. What possible attraction, I wondered, could Dickens have for the author of The World According To Garp and The Cider-House Rules? I would think that two more dissimilar writers couldn’t be imagined. The idea was tucked away in my memory under “curiosities from the world of book-chat.”

Then, maybe three weeks ago, I was picking through Something To Remember Me By, a volume of short fiction by Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote an introduction to this tryptich of novellas, its theme being precisely this fact, that they were novellas as opposed to novels. He discussed our general failure in recent years to make as much time for reading as people used to, hence a general trend to make fiction shorter than it used to be. I don’t remember the exact context, but as an illustration of the sort of long novel to which people no longer want to bother making a commitment of time and effort, Bellow specifically cited Little Dorrit.

Item filed, note with question attached: why Little Dorrit? Dickens wrote plenty of long novels. Why didn’t Bellow cite Bleak House or The Pickwick Papers? It seems to me that they are both generally better known.

Next came my conversation at Marie Callender’s last Wednesday night with Jan Barnett. Jan told me over soup and buffalo wings that she was endeavoring to stake out some time in her life these days for the things she considers important, not the least of which is reading. When she mentioned that she was reading some of the short stories of Colette, it was like someone had tossed a glass of cold water in my lap. I suddenly found myself thinking back to my college days, or at least to Jan’s, when we were all, each in our own way, so interested in literature that we were reading like fiends. In my case the drive was especially strong because I wanted to be a writer, wanted it worse than anything, and of course as my erstwhile teacher Don Baird had said to me when I was 18, “As for writing yourself, keep reading. Sure, all writers are readers.”

From my teens until I was about forty, it seems I was always reading something, usually something from the “western canon,” e.g. something from the entire pantheon of serious western literature, running the gamut from Homer to Tolstoy, from Thomas Mann to Saul Bellow. (For the most part steering clear of the Victorians, except for Oscar Wilde, who flouted their conventions.) But as my forties progressed and the realization that I was not, after all, going to be a Hemingway or a Henry Miller or even a W.H. Auden began to coalesce in real time like a photograph in the darkroom becoming ever-sharper, my interest in reading great literature gradually began to fade, to extend the simile, like an old Polaroid. Now here’s Jan, who by the way has earned my admiration for the graceful way in which she has accepted her own version of my experience: when she was in college, Jan dreamed of becoming a great artist. She knows now that she probably isn’t going to be the next Georgia O’Keeffe, but she has accepted the fact with equanimity, still enjoys drawing, and by the way, is trying to block out time these days for such things as reading the short stories of Colette. Noted and filed.

Next, just yesterday morning in fact, I was reading an essay by critic Sven Birkerts in a book of his that Lucia gave me, Readings. The essay, Against The Current, concerned itself with Birkert’s experience—and, by extension, our experience generally—of “losing touch” with the world of close reading and the sparks it can cause to fly, thanks mostly to the way our postmodern perceptions have been totally taken over and reshaped, even redefined, by the all-pervading ocean of electronic media in which we spend every moment of our waking lives these days. Using as a starting point his self-described inability to read and appreciate poetry as he once did, Birkerts moves on to a detailed discussion, first of how our—his—altered modes of perception have endangered the attentiveness needed for reading, and then to details of some of the small steps he has taken to try and recover some of that, chiefly by making the sacrifice of doing some things in a deliberately slower, less “efficient” manner than they are usually done these days. For example, writing letters with a pen rather than a computer, and then taking the time to walk to the mailbox to mail them, noticing things around him on the way.

Slowing down, in other words, and tuning in while at the same time tuning out.

All of these little experiences brought me to a decision: I was going to read Little Dorrit. Yesterday afternoon I got in the car and drove over to the Chula Vista Public Library to see if it was on the shelf. I knew that it probably would be; after all, who reads Little Dorrit any more?

And then, as I was entering the library on this mission of reading, another tiny fillip of experience occured, a sort of closing-the-circle gesture on the part of the book gods, which, come to think of it, could not have been more perfect had it been scripted for the occasion.

The library’s little used bookstore, tucked away in one corner of the main library, is open on Saturday afternoons. I seldom go in there because they seldom have anything that catches my interest and anyway, in my current living circumstances I don’t have much room for storing books.

But as I wandered into the little shop yesterday, and browsed around the cramped shelves, I spotted an old friend: Literature: Structure Sound and Sense, by Laurence Perrine. (Harcourt, Brace & World, © 1956, 1959, 1963, 1966, 1969, 1970.) This was the very textbook that we used in Donald S. Baird’s English 6 class, “Composition and Literature,” Southwestern College, Fall Semester, 1973. (MWF 8:00-8:50 a.m.—Imagine discussing T.S. Eliot at eight O’clock in the morning! Still, we did.)

I was 18, it was my first semester of college, and this textbook, along with Baird’s own curmudgeonly pontificatings, was a key factor in the shaping of my own tastes in poetry and fiction during the years that followed. (Baird’s greatest gift to me was Yeats. He could be a little prick, but he did me that favor.)

Donald S. Baird is probably dead by now. And there was that book. Did I say “the gods?” More likely, Baird’s own curmudgeonly little ghost patting my butt as I entered the library in search of Dickens, giving his seal of approval to the quest. As I recall, the cost of this textbook in 1973 was $10. I got it back yesterday for 75¢. It, and Lake Woebegon Days by Garrison Keillor, and yes, The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot, eminent Victorian. Total for all three: $1.75.

The library’s two copies of Little Dorrit were both in—surprise!—in fact I had my choice between the one in old blue library binding and the one in old red library binding. Both are slightly yellowed and just a shade tattered. I chose the red one: New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. 1951.

As of this morning I have read up to Chapter Seven. It’s going to be a long journey, as Saul Bellow promised it would be; I’m on page 64 of a book that runs 788 pages. And so thoroughly has the world changed between Dickens’ time and our own that I am already having occasional trouble “taking his sense,” not so much with regard to the language as to the sensibilities of his characters. The Victorians’ shared system of values and beliefs, not to mention their customs, bore little resemblance to whatever shared system of beliefs we have left in the age of the Internet. But no matter, it is giving me a warm feeling in the gut to begin this long journey, and I am determined to see what lies at the other end.

II

Two weeks ago I announced in these pages that I had decided to read Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. I’m just about halfway through it now, a few pages short of finishing Part One. What are my impressions of the book so far? Well, right off, I can see why some reviewers compared Wolfe’s A Man In Full with Dickens. An argument could indeed be made that Dickens was the Tom Wolfe of his day, or Tom Wolfe the Dickens of ours. Michael Burgess and I were discussing Dickens and my decision to read Little Dorrit the other day. “Dickens was a journalist,” Michael remarked. Indeed he was, in the same sense that Balzac and Zola were journalists. The landscape of London at the beginning of the industrial revolution was what Dickens painted, and he was always exposing the social ills of his era; Little Dorrit’s target was the institution of debtor’s prison. In the custom of that time, his novels were serialized in magazines before they appeared between covers, so he was indeed writing for a popular audience. Novels don’t get serialized in magazines any more, but Wolfe was a magazine journalist before he began writing books. The parallels are easy to draw, which makes me wonder about John Irving’s hissy-fit on Canadian TV.

An American reader in the early twenty-first century can’t help but find Dickens a little verbose. It isn’t just because we don’t read long books any more, either. Both journalism and prose fiction have become noticeably less long-winded in the past 100 years. As a journalist who has studied the history of journalism as well as of literature, I can testify that as you progress from 1900 to 2000 in reading newspaper articles, you’ll find them progressively less and less “wordy” until you reach today’s journalism, which is so terse by comparison with earlier eras as to seem like shorthand. When I pick up a newspaper article written at the time of World War I, I’m aware that I’m reading prose. Ornate sentences, carefully crafted. Curlicues of simile and metaphor. It’s obvious that some of these guys were writing with pen and paper, not typewriters. In fact it wasn’t until the 1960s that this kind of thing finally disappeared. As the newspaper market shrank, newspaper writing became less and less distinguishable. Journalism isn’t crafted at all any more, unless you’re talking about the opinion columnists. Journalism today is churned out as product. Pick up the front page of any major newspaper and the reporting of any two journalists will read pretty much like the reporting of any other two. Formulaic, brief and to the point.

Of course Dickens wasn’t writing newspaper stories, he was writing fiction. But he was writing in a leisurely, mannered style which was the norm of his day and not of ours, whether you’re talking about journalism or fiction. Leisurely, mannered prose fiction was precisely what people like Hemingway, Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler were trying to get away from. They, and their contemporaries, laid the ground rules for the kind of fiction we’re used to reading now: pithy, from the hip. DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, in fact, have taken this postmodern stuff so far that their prose resembles Marlon Brando’s mumbling. It’s not a uniform rule, of course. Some contemporary authors have gone out of their way to be unaccommodating to our short attention spans: I think of Pynchon, Barth, Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy was so massive as to draw comparisons with Tolstoy from the British critics in 1991, (but which sank like a rock), and even Garcia Marquez, who dispensed with paragraphs in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. But these are acts of intentional obtuseness: guys like Dickens and Henry James were long-winded because that was what their audience expected, not the opposite. They weren’t flying in the face of anything. And, come to think of it, Pynchon, Barth and Garcia Marquez actually belong to an earlier generation. I still think of them as modern, but their heyday was the 1960s and ‘70s. Garcia Marquez published 100 Years of Solitude in 1967. That’s a hop, skip and a jump back for me, but I’m pushing 50. To anyone under 35 that must seem like the olden days. And some to think of it, this is the 30th anniversary year of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon is no spring chicken either. Barth must be in his seventies: he was hip to the hippies when they weren’t too stoned to read.

And then there is the question of what used to be called “sensibility.” The 19th century was (I should say, is) infamous for its “sentimentality.” (I’ll have to get out the OED and research the history of this word; I’m not sure it even existed in Dickens’ time.) From the time of Rousseau until the massive global disllusionment that followed World War I, public taste tended toward bathos and tears. “Feeling is all,” Goethe said in Faust, and he may have meant it ironically, but he wasn’t kidding. For a century, novelists, poets and playwrights laid it on with a trowel, which is why we find so many of them unreadable now. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited by no less than Abraham Lincoln with being the spark that started the American Civil War; today one can’t read it without laughing. I’m not comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe with Dickens, but I am saying that the “sensibility” of the mid-19th century tended to favor scenes and characterizations which today we would consider mawkish. I remember my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Terry, (who was very much a child of the “hip” ‘60s) mercilessly ridiculing Longfellow’s poem The Wreck of the Hesperus for its gooey sentiment.

Again, I’m using an extreme example: Longfellow is a second-rate poet. But my point is that you do find in Dickens, or I do anyway, some undeniable traces of this pandering to the “sensibilities” of his time which can make some of his characters seem a little unbelievable to modern readers. Little Dorrit, so christlike in her self-sacrificing, so relentlessly sweet, humble and devoted to her father, looks to me like Mary Pickford hamming it up in a silent film. Arthur Clenham is a painfully nice guy who, in the manner of his time, goes around acting like he has no dick. Even when he falls in love with Pet, he tries to persuade himself that he hasn’t. God forbid that any Victorian should admit having a dick. (Curious, or perhaps not quite so curious after all, is the existence, of which we are now fully aware, of a very active and fecund pornographic sub-culture in Victorian England, of which My Secret Life and The Pearl are two famous examples.)

But having said all that, there is a great deal about Little Dorrit that has a contemporary ring. England no longer has debtor’s prison, but reading about it reminds me of how thoroughly our American attitudes toward fortune and misfortune have been influenced by those of our sister-culture on the other side of the pond. Last week I was recounting for our publisher, Linda Rosas, my interview and subsequent e-mail communication with “the grief lady,” Pam Ramsey, whose life has so totally careened out of control in the past few years that she is now a desolate case, crying for help to the local newspaper. “We all choose our path in life,” Linda said breezily, and as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in Roman Polanski’s Tess, which was of course based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles by eminent Victorian Thomas Hardy, in which some casual passerby remarks of Tess’ misfortunes, “It’s yer own fault.”

There you go. W.H. Auden pointed out in one of his essays that it’s no accident Catholic countries gave us almshouses, while Protestant countries gave us debtor’s prison. Catholic culture is (or was, anyway) untouched by the influence of John Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination added up, in the countries where Protestantism triumphed, to a prevailing idea that you could be as selfish and self-centered as you pleased, while continuing to think that God was smiling on you. Since everyone was predestined, before the Creation, to be either damned or saved, it is therefore a sign of God’s grace if you’re well-off and prosperous in this world, and a sign of His disfavor if you’re poor or down-and-out.

It’s a short leap from there to the idea that there is something shameful about being poor. There are countries in the world where begging is an honorable profession. But that’s not the case in England and it is certainly not the case here. In our Anglo-American culture, even to be unemployed is a kind of blot on your character. I know, I’ve been there. The sight of the Dorrit family languishing in the Marshalsea, with Dorrit’s elder daughter, Fanny, forced to work as a dancer and at the same time hissing and spitting at anyone whom she perceives as casting aspersions on her “genteel” family, is a sharp reminder of where all of this came from. Admittedly, I cannot relate to Fanny’s, or her father’s, anxiety over word getting out that any member of their family has been actually forced to work for a living, she as a dancer and Little Dorrit as a seamstress. We don’t have quite that level of class snobbery here: America does have its rich class, as most countries do, but it doesn’t have an idle rich class, as England once did, a landed gentry that considered it shameful to soil its hands with any kind of labor. But pride and hubris are themes that cut to the bone in American fiction just as they do in Dickens, both fictions growing from societies in which money success (America) or preserving one’s “position in society” (England) are the terms that delineate the good life.

Small wonder Wolfe made the critics think of Dickens when he created Charlie Croker and company. We might not sing songs like Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie or Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice any more, but Dickens and Wolfe were definitely mining the same vein.

So. Is great journalism great literature? Tom Wolfe actually created that question himself in the 1960s when he and his ilk created the so-called “new journalism,” which in short order had Norman Mailer riffing on himself (and winning the Pulitzer) for The Armies of the Night, an exercise in narcissism disguised as journalism, which makes it only that much more ironic that he should have dismissed A Man In Full as “journalism” five years ago. Family feuds. I know something about those. I also know that Dickens is probably smiling from his grave.

Notes From Underground

Let me tell you, my stress levels have really dropped since the election last week.

I mean, they're down to nearly nothing. I'm Mr. Valium, and I don't even take valium.

Is it because I'm happy about the outcome of the election, and expecting a wonderful, golden new day in America now that The One is about to be anointed Dear Leader? Am I dancing around singing It's Almost Like Being In Love in anticipation of what the Obama-ites have been promising us for two years now, that with the Dear Leader installed in the White House, we're all going to join hands across America and start singing I'd like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company?

Don't make me laugh.

No, it's because I have made good on the promise I made to myself before the election, to wit, that if Obama were indeed, as has come to pass, chosen to be anointed Dear Leader, I was going to drop out. Unlike Alec Baldwin, who threatens to build a raft and sail to Tasmania every time it looks as if the Republicans might win an election, (but has yet to do it) I have fulfilled my promise. I can't afford Tasmania, but I can sure as hell afford to pull the plug.

And not only that, but it's easy.

A generation ago Norman Mailer gave an interview upon publishing a perfectly dreadful novel called Ancient Evenings. The book was a fantasia upon, oh, anal sex and such, set in ancient Egypt. Now, Mailer had never written a historical novel before and one could argue that this one attempt failed. I've always suspected that Mailer wrote Ancient Evenings because he decided that his archrival Gore Vidal, much more skilled and adept at historical fiction than Mailer, needed upstaging.

It didn't work. The year after Ancient Evenings came out, (1983) Vidal published Lincoln, just possibly his greatest novel. People are still reading Lincoln. You can pick up a copy of Ancient Evenings on Amazon.com for $.01. I checked.

Now, the reason I bring up the late Mr. Mailer, and his ridiculous attempt at a historical novel some 25 years ago,is precisely because of that interview he gave when the book came out. I read it, and I remember him telling the interviewer that the reason he wrote Ancient Evenings was because he felt so out of place and out of touch in the America of the 1980s, e.g. Ronald Reagan's America.

Now that we're all about to start living in Barack Obama's America, all of a sudden I know exactly how Mailer felt.

Only I'm not going to respond by writing pornography set in ancient Egypt. I'm going to respond by disengaging. In fact I've already done it. The mass media have no place in my life for the next four years. I've quit reading the newspapers. (The only part of the Washington Post I look at any more is Sherman's Lagoon. The rest goes in the trash, where, if you ask me, the Washington Post belongs anyway.) I don't watch television, but that was no sacrifice; I didn't watch television before. I might tune in WETA if they're playing Handel, but the minute I hear that ominous voice say, "From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Howard Putz," I turn the damn thing off until Handel comes back. I still use Google as my home page, but I've switched off "My Google" so I don't have to look at news headlines. I have canceled my subscriptions to any and all magazines that even faintly smack of politics or current affairs. From here on out I subscribe only to Grammophone, Indycar, Bicycling, Baseball America and The New Criterion.

In short, I don't want to know what Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Kennedy are doing out there. I just don't want to know. Don't tell me. If the headlines starting January 21 feature things like "CONGRESS CONSIDERS REPARATIONS FOR DESCENDANTS OF CHINESE RAILROAD WORKERS; APOLOGIZES FOR OPPRESSION," or "BILL WOULD AUTHORIZE FREE CONDOMS TO KINDERGARTNERS," or "HOUSE OKs $2 BILLION FOR STUDY OF WHY FISH DON'T WEAR iPODS," I don't want to know about it. And when you all see that headline reading "IRAN LAUNCHES NUCLEAR ATTACK ON ISRAEL; OBAMA INVITES AHMADINEJAD TO TEA,'" don't bother me with that one either.

While the party goes on in anticipation of this brave new world, I am plunging myself into a study of the tonal language of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643.) I'm not a musician, so it's slow going, but I have plenty of time. I am in fact working on a novel, and Monteverdi's music figures in the plot, so this isn't just a case of academic onanism; however I have a short list of projects to keep me occupied during the upcoming reign of Obama and his little politboro of Hugo Chavez clones, once I have finished with my studies of Renaissance Italian church music. They include re-reading Proust's The Search For Lost Time, studying French, becoming a notary public (and maybe buying a scooter to go with that) learning to make creme brulee and memorizing a whole bunch of Shakespeare sonnets in order to annoy people with them at dinner parties. I'm going to work on improving my chess game. I'm going to study the history of ancient Greece. I'm going to paint as I like and die happy.

But I'm not going anywhere near the news. It'll be tough, living as I do in Washington, D.C., but as Garfield the Cat said when he announced his plan to spend an entire week in bed, "I refuse to let anything deter me from staying the course."

Oddly, (or perhaps not so oddly) I'm thinking of one of Paul Simon's early songs, one that he must cringe to hear now. I Am A Rock should never have been recorded, much less released. Its lyric is the worst kind of sophomoric poetry, the sort of stuff I might have written at 16 to vent my spleen at some cheerleader who turned me down for a date. But its last verse, insipid or not, pretty much sums things up for me right now. I can't quote the whole verse due to copyright laws, but go listen to the song. The last verse has to do with wrapping himself in a shield of poetry and books as his "armor."

Yeah, well. That's me. I am a rock, I am an island. 'Til 2012, anyway.

And a rock feels no pain.

And islands don't read the papers.

The Dawn Of A New Day In America

I typed that headline with my own two fingers: "The Dawn Of A New Day in America."

And now that I've had a few minutes to wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes, it's time to play that fun game I was playing late last week when it did indeed look as if the Democrats were going to take all the marbles this year.

The game is, see if you can find something good in any of this.

Last week, if you'll remember, I was able to think of three good things coming out of a Barack Obama victory in the presidential election:

1. No one would be able to get away with calling America a "racist country" any more.

2. As a direct result of #1, both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have to go out and get a real job.

3. For the next eight years we won't have to look at the Clintons.

But doggone, wouldn't you know it, a can-do optimist such as myself can always find another silver lining in what any sane person would realize is a pretty sad situation. True, Obama and his Gang of Four (Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Kennedy) will get busy quickly appointing ultra-liberal judges with no interest in the Constitution except twisting it to further the left-wing agenda; the aforesaid politboro will tighten the screws on anyone who opposes the abuses of the big labor unions and do away with secret union ballots so the Big Labor fat cats can more easily intimidate union voters; they will also bring back the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," which will enable them to shut down talk radio and silence any and all opposition voices in the country; they'll quadruple your taxes to pay for more giveaway programs in which they will be the ones who decide who gets the goodies; they'll abandon Iraq to Al Qaida and they'll weaken our national defense in the name of making other nations "like" us better, thereby inviting another Sept. 11,because anyone who thinks talking nice to Islamofascists will make them purr like kittens is nuts. They'll nationalize health insurance so you have to wait eight months to see a doctor, stifle initiative by regulating business large and small to death, and for dessert, don't be surprised if they gin up some kind of national "hate speech" law which will codify and make official what they already think: that anyone who disagrees with anything they say is spreading "hate speech." Who knows but that I and all the other bloggers in America who express conservative ideas may be in prison by 2010.

Eight years ago the lefty bloggers were saying similar things about George W. Bush, that is when they were able to shove their tongues and eyeballs back into their heads. Now it's our turn to have the fun of "speaking truth to power."

Hey, last night millions of you were all cheering for this, Mr. and Ms. America. We'll see how you feel about it in a couple of years.

But I was going to discuss another silver lining to this cloud.

Well, yeah, actually it's a biggie. Listen, folks. When the Democrats are finished with their postelection bacchanalia and are looking at their bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror while they reach for the Pepto-Bismol, it's only going to be a matter of moments before they come to an awful realization.

Nobody has anyone but them to blame now.

Washington becomes a one-party town in January. The Democrats will control all three branches of government. Totally. While that gives them carte blanche to build their queasy brand of socialism, let's keep something else in mind: no one has dared to whisper this throughout the entire campaign as Obama went around promising pie in the sky to everybody, but history has spoken pretty clearly on this subject, to wit, socialism has been a miserable failure everywhere it's been tried. And I'm not just talking about the Soviet Union. I'm talking about everywhere it's been tried. There is no recorded instance of a country's economy and its people prospering in a situation where the government held the reins of everything, regulating and nationalizing to its heart's content. Socialism always causes initiative to drop, productivity to sink, inefficiency to burgeon, capital to flee and quality of goods to deteriorate. Did you ever hear of anyone wanting to buy any product from the Soviet bloc except vodka, caviar or weapons? There was a reason for that, you know.

You're waiting for me to come to the silver lining, aren't you? Actually, I mentioned it above: nobody will have anyone to blame but the Democrats when things go down the crapper. The Republicans will be in any practical sense, gone. They won't be in charge of anything.

Oh, dear, dear, dear. What on earth are the poor media going to do? Without the Republicans around to blame everything on, who are they going to blame?

Well, let's see. The last time I checked the numbers, roughly 91 percent of all this nation's journalists were registered Democrats. Anyone care to make book that when things go down the crapper, the media will blame someone other than the Democrats?

I'd say that's probably the best bet since taking the Yankees over Pittsburgh in the 1927 World Series.

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a fearless forecast here. When the young man who saw the presidency as a learning experience and persuaded America to let him have the job by means of a silver tongue and massive amounts of Internet-generated gold steps on his crank, (and he's bound to) one of three things will happen. The media will:

(a) Ignore it.

(b) Insist it was no big deal and that "everybody" does it.

or

(c) Claim their Chosen One is the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. (And, by the way, since the circumstances will allow them to add this particular frosting to the cupcake, they'll also claim it's a "racist" conspiracy.)

However, even with "racist" added to it as a bonus point, this last expedient might not fly as well as it did a decade ago, because the Republicans really will be out of power. Kind of hard to make a "vast conspiracy" out of a bunch of guys who are figuratively hanging around the union hall sucking up the free coffee and swapping thigh-slappers about the old days.

And if the economy tanks, or what's more likely, stagnates, with inflation and unemployment both soaring to truly Jimmy Carter levels, since periods of heavy government interference with the free market usually do result in sluggish, stagnant economies, the media will:

(a) Ignore it.

(b) Put on a happy face and try to tell everyone that the economy is really rosy.

(c) Run lots and lots of stories about when things were worse,

or

(d) Call in panels of "experts" who will figure out a way to claim that the downturn actually began with the previous administration and hence, the Republicans are to blame.

By the way, the media did NOT do this, or anything like it, in 2001 when the economy was in trouble, although it was as clear as day that the recession had begun in March, 2000, when Clinton was still president and Bush's election was seven months away. The fact that the 2001 recession had begun on Clinton's watch was loudly ignored by all but the conservative media.

But no matter. It's going to be fun to watch. Remember "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more?" A lot of people on both sides of the aisle were sorry, I'm sure, that Nixon didn't make good on that threat. Perhaps he should have. While it would have meant passing up his turn to be president, he sure as hell would have had the last laugh.

And, mark my words, somebody's going to have the last laugh. And I would also make book that it won't be Pelosi, Reid or any other member of the soon-to-be-politboro running America.

Stick around. After the agony, this might be good for some laughs.

An Open Letter To A Friend On The Eve Of Election 2008

This is the text of an e-mail I sent this afternoon. Tomorrow we vote. God help us all.

Dear Rob:

Well, tomorrow it all ends. Two years of this crap. I think we're all about to collapse from campaign fatigue.

You know, when we were debating last week about McCain versus Obama, there's one thing I didn't bring up. And I should have.

Aside from the fact that having to choose between those two guys is kind of like having to decide whether you want to swallow lye or swallow battery acid, I don't know if I made it clear that it isn't really so much Barack Obama himself I'm leery of. If it were just a question of sticking him in the White House so that all of those aging hippies from the 1960s, who remember being at Woodstock even though they were at home in Oxnard that day, can hum a few bars of "We Have Overcome" and feel young again, well, I could see a set of circumstances under which that wouldn't be too intolerable. Like if Newt Gingrich were still Speaker of the House, for example.

And there you have it, as my niece Alicia used to say. It's not so much an Obama presidency that scares me as the prospect of an Obama presidency with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy running Congress, with all opposition swept away. Boy, if this doesn't scare you as a conservative, you're not paying attention. This is going to be the ultimate case of the weasel given a key to the chicken coop. Obama's little politboro is going to have a free and untrammeled hand to ram through any program, any bill, any tax hike they want. Nothing will stand in their way. The first thing they'll do is appoint and confirm a few hundred ultra-liberal court judges. That way the Democrats will be in complete charge of all three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. If THAT doesn’t scare you, you’re really not paying attention.

And after that, Jenny Bar The Door, as my mother used to say. In four years they'll have turned this country into England in the 1950s -- all initiative squashed, free markets suppressed, welfare rolls swollen, thousands of newly-created federal bureaucrats sitting on their fat asses collecting benefits and waiting for their pensions to kick in, half the population on the dole and the other half paying for it. And with the New York Times and the Washington Post jumping up and down like a couple of squealing pom-pom girls, cheerleading for the whole sorry spectacle. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no doubt rubbing his hands with glee at this moment as he orders more enriched uranium and draws big X’s over Israel on the map, while Hugo Chavez must be kissing his picture of Che Guevara and peeing his pants with joy as he schemes to make Latin America Marxist again, fearing no opposition from an American president who thinks he can deal with thugs like Chavez by inviting them over for tea and schmoozing.

If the Orkney Islands were within my budget, I'd be gone by Wednesday and I wouldn't even take a shortwave radio with me. Instead, I’ll be locked in my study reading Edmund Burke, De Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn. Come get me when it’s over.

And, finally, here you have my last word on the subject. Bring on President Obama and the United Socialist States of America. And when, in a year or so, you find out you’re working for the government until June 28 to pay your taxes, not April 30 as is now the case, well, as Billy Joel put it, “Go on and cry in your coffee but don’t come bitchin’ to me.”

Ave atque vale.