Happy Friday!

Review: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

I remember reading sections of Catch-22  in highschool English, but I hadn’t gone back to read the whole thing until a week or two ago. It’s a book that comes in at #7 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 greatest novels, and whether or not you agree with that ranking, I think it’s safe to say that it belongs on the list. I mentioned this yesterday, but I think Heller gets unfairly pidgeonholed as a whacky satirist rather than as a top-notch writer or a storyteller.

Still, there’s no denying the man has a knack for humor. Take the prosaic progression and punchline in this line, for example:

"There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma, there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic Cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard, who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the medical corps by a faulty anode in an IBM machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him."

The absurdity of a poor cetologist landing in the medical corps near the frontlines of WWII is typical of the crazy conundrums that fill the novel- from Milo Minderbinder’s syndicate (Everybody’s got a share!) to the political maneuvers of the dastardly military brass.

There were  a couple spots where the attempt at humor gets to be a little much, where the dialogue starts to resemble an old Abbott & Costello or Groucho Marx routine, where every line is a punchline, but by and large the satire is hilarious and effective.

And here’s what I really loved about the book. The chapters present a disjointed and non-chronological timeline where past events are referred to, then placed like puzzle pieces into greater context, and finally dealt with in-depth later on in the narrative- some of it a pretty gruesome counterpoint to the funny material that surrounds it. It all has the effect of throwing the reader into the same confusing and seemingly endless loop that the characters themselves are stuck in- with one key exception: the ever-climbing number of combat missions the men are required to fly. This last fact provides a common thread for the entire book, and gives an ominous crescendo to the unfolding action. It’s brilliant how it all comes together.

From the Pen of Joseph Heller

For all the attention Catch-22 gets for being a "hardee har har," laugh-a-minute, military  satire, I think Joseph Heller often gets short shrift as a wordsmith. Here are just a few highlights from my recent turn through his masterpiece. All highlights are mine. They're just a few of the lines that struck me as particularly powerful.

The only end in sight was Yossarian’s own, and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy, rumple-headed indestructible smile, cracked forever across the front of his face like the brim of a black ten-gallon hat.

Havermeyer was the best damn bombardier they had, but he flew straight and level all the way from the IP to the target, and even far beyond the target until he saw the falling bombs strike ground and explode in a darting spurt of abrupt orange, that flashed beneath the swirling pall of smoke and pulverized debris geysering up wildly in huge rolling waves of gray and black.

Each day’s delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into each man’s ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. Everyone smelled of formaldehyde.

Major _ _ DeCoverly was a splendid, awe-inspiring, grave old man with a massive, leonine head and an angry shock of wild white hair that raged like a blizzard around his stern, patriarchal face.

Major _ _ DeCoverly straightened with astonishment at Milo’s affrontery and concentrated upon him the full  fury of his storming countenance with its rugged overhang of gullied forehead, and huge crag of a hump-backed nose that came charging out of his face wrathfully like a Big 10 fullback.

Along the ground suddenly on both sides of the path he saw dozens of new mushrooms the rain had spawned, poking their nodular fingers up through the clammy earth like lifeless stocks of flesh, sprouting in such necrotic profusion everywhere he looked that they seemed to be proliferating right before his eyes.

Poet's Corner: Thomas R. Smith

Ode to the Vinyl Record

by Thomas R. Smith (all emphasis is mine)

The needle lowers into the groove
and I'm home. It could be any record
I've lived with and loved a long time: Springsteen
or Rodrigo, Ray Charles or Emmylou
Harris: Not only the music, but
the whirlpool shimmering on the turntable
funneling blackly down into the ocean
of the ear—even the background
pops and hisses a worn record
wraps the music in creaturely
imperfections so hospitable to our own.
Since those first Beatles and Stones LPs
plopped down spindles on record players
we opened like tiny suitcases at sweaty
junior high parties while parents were out,
how many nights I've pulled around 
my desires a vinyl record's cloak
of flaws and found it a perfect fit,
the crackling unclarity and turbulence
of the country's lo-fi basement heart
madly spinning, making its big dark sound.

That’s pretty good. There’s almost a dash of Kerouac in the rhythm of some of the lines, especially the last couple, that really does it for me. You can really hear the crackle and hiss, and see the glassy threads turning.

What They Were Reading: William Faulkner

INTERVIEWER

Do you read your contemporaries?

FAULKNER

No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

-from the Art of Fiction No. 12

Happy Friday!

Well, as far as I can tell this is only a concept put together to sell the digital track, so you can’t get in there and play it like you could with this game. Still, it’ll be worth a couple minutes to the Downton Abbey fans out there:

Eudora Welty: Songwriter

Paul Simon scored a worldwide hit with his 1986 album Graceland , winning the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1987. The title track from that album, and the song that Simon has called the best he’s ever written, also won Best Record of the Year in 1988. He did it by collaborating with musicians and songwriters from all over the place: African musicians like the Boyoyo Boys, Juluka and Ladysmith Black Mombazo, as well as the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt and Los Lobos closer to home.

And while the music on the album is a mash-up of different styles (World-beat, Zydeco, rock, a cappella, etc.) the lyrics are generally Simon’s own- with one exception I uncovered recently. Here’s how Simon begins the title track, “Graceland:”

 “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar”

Great imagery, right? Now here is a passage describing a train ride through the Mississippi Delta from Eudora Welty’s 1946 novel Delta Wedding :

“The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragon fly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.”

Ms. Welty is not credited on the album, but we were  able to dig up the intriguing jam-session photograph you see above. It’s interesting that she was not asked to add her own vocal skills to the final cut of the record.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: The War on Style

Elmore Leonard: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Jonathan Franzen: "Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting."

Esther Freud: "Cut out the metaphors and similes."

David Hare: "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it."

Stephen King: "The road to hell is paved with adjectives"

You know what really bugs me? The War on Style.

Look, I get these arguments. I really do. Yesterday’s post was all about simplicity. I get as bothered as the next guy by purple, florid prose (see the Henry James passage in this post for an example. Shudder.) But when was it decided that every great piece of fiction has to read like a USA Today article? I mean, come on, if the whole point of great writing is for the writer to take themselves out of the final product, then why am I reading these authors in the first place? Why not spend my time reading the hundreds of thousands of computer-generated books out there instead? I guess I’m in the camp that says the author should bring more to the table than a compelling plot line.

Let’s look at the world of painting for an example. Can you imagine if visual artists followed an Elmore Leonard-like rule that “if it looks like painting, I repaint it?” Every art museum on earth would be chock-full of realistic, tromp l’oeil paintings that look little different from photographs. That’s cool, I guess… for a while anyway. 

But sometimes you get tired of admiring technical skill. Sometimes you want to see the artist’s imagination at work, you want to see their innermost feelings splayed across the canvas. You want to see things in a way you never could have imagined them yourself. In short, you want to see some style.

Here are some visuals to help you see what I'm talking about. What if I mentioned the names Picasso, Dali, Monet, Matisse and Van Gogh, and the only styles of painting that came to mind were the ones on the left below?

Picasso, before and after:

Dali, before and after:

Monet, before and after:

Matisse, before and after:

Van Gogh, before and after:

I won’t call any of those early, left-side paintings bad or boring. I'd give my proverbial left-nut to be able to paint like that. But isn’t the world a little richer because those same artists moved on from the technical proficiency displayed on the left to blaze the new schools of painting displayed on the right? Isn't it great that they made it okay for others like Chagall or Lichtenstein or Warhol to bypass a realistic, technically proficient phase, and head straight for their own revolution of artistic styles?

Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism may not be your cup of tea, but there's no denying they exhibit an entirely different pull on the human spirit than paintings done in a photographic mimicry of real-world images can. Style matters. And the fact that styles differ, matters.

So back to literature. You want to pass out writing advice? Great. The more the merrier. But let's not pretend we're not losing something significant when the drumbeat to eliminate all adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, similes and complex verbs crowds out those who were born to take a slightly (or vastly) different path. Those parts of speech may just be the otherworldly color and heavy brushstrokes that will define a new kind of literature.

Le Mot Juste- Without a Thesaurus

In A Moveable Feast  Hemingway calls Ezra Pound:

“the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use…” 

Like Flaubert, Hemingway was known to be  a believer in the ‘exact, right word’ and is widely admired for his ability to cut to the chase and deliver a punch in just a few, well-chosen words.

Yesterday’spost mentioning In Our Time  jogged my memory about one of my formative “mot juste” reading experiences. It happened while I was reading  the short story “Big Two-Hearted River” in that early collection of Hemingway’s, and it consisted of one simple sentence.

If you’ve read that two-part short story, you know it’s light on plot, but heavy on description. In minute detail, we follow the character of Nick Adams heading out, alone, on a fishing trip. Though it’s not explicitly stated, the story’s got a lot to do with coming home from war and the regenerative powers of nature. But in the midst of his lengthy descriptions of the trout visible in the clear water of the river, Hemingway delivers this short paragraph:

“His heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.”

For whatever reason, that last line absolutely knocked me on my tookus. To the point that I still remember it ten years later. Hemingway didn’t even have to tell us what the feeling was  (Did Nick feel jittery? Serene? Ecstatic? Sentimental? Enthralled? In his element? Happy? What?!) He didn’t have to scour the thesaurus for just the right phrasing or color. What was it Nick felt? The old feeling! All of it. Nothing more.

How incredibly plain and simple that is, but how effective it is in showing us that this renewed connection with nature is rejuvenating and invigorating and relaxing and a hundred other things, too. It doesn’t matter what the feeling was, what matters is the effect it had on the character. And that’s what makes it exactly the right word to use. I'm in awe of that kind of finesse.

Hemingwood Anderson

In this post we mentioned Sherwood Anderson’s influence on the generation of writers that followed him and that came to dominate the 20^th century literary landscape. But it’s one thing to talk about influence, and another thing altogether to see it plain on the page. Take a look at this passage from Winesburg, Ohio , and tell me you don’t see the pared down language and short-sentence-style that is so commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

"The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean, that paragraph could be something right out of In Our Time.