Recent Short Story Publications

 

Celebratorily vibing with my wife 

Hey. It's been a minute. A minute of such drama and duration that all the cool kids have been sucked away to Substack, and my lonely antique blog has been exposed for what it is: a sad antique. 

We do not care! We soldier on! 

Below are some links containing recent publications. I'm trying to play it cool (like the cool kids mentioned earlier) but the truth is that these are my very first pubs -- or pubs of fiction, I should say. 

The first, a story called "Some News," appears in the second-ever issue of The Champagne Room. You can purchase a copy of this women-run, print-only journal right here: https://www.thechampagneroomjournal.com/product-page/the-champagne-room-issue-02

The second is a story called "End of an Acquaintance." It appears online -- for free! -- in The Courtship of Winds. You can read that one here: https://www.thecourtshipofwinds.org/s-c-ferguson

Hero-Bashing: Thoughts on Bellow's Prose

    In an interview on a Spanish arts-and-culture show in the late 1980s (available now on YouTube), Saul Bellow admits (or is it boasts?) that no less an eminence than W.H. Auden once challenged his approach to long-form prose. Auden contended, said Bellow, that the fineness of Bellow’s writing – its euphony and romping rhythms, its elevation of the sentence to a new poetic form – was doomed, was unsustainable. Bellow was making a huge mistake; he was bound to drive himself mad with his efforts, to wreck the keel of his prosody on the rocks of so demanding a form. These demands being, of course, the arranging of plot, the drawing and development of character, the mixing of voices and teasing of themes – demands the poet must certainly answer, but in smaller, more manageable ways. In Auden’s view, language, for the novelist, was primarily a medium; for the poet, however, it was the the entirety: medium, action, and artwork all at once. By presuming to foreground his language, a prose that verged on verse, Bellow (in Auden’s view) was confusing the tools for the work itself, like a man too busy admiring his brush to paint on the actual canvas.
    Somehow I doubt this anecdote, with its bragging tone disguised as self-reproach. For one thing, few readers, whether they’re casual fans or laurel-decked poets like Auden, could accuse Saul Bellow of short-changing the novel – and certainly not by mid-century, in the wake of Ulysses (to say nothing of Finnegans Wake). Bellow, in other words, was not alone in his elevation of prose over mere reportage. After all, he was an artist in the Age of Style, an era which, though subject to tremors in taste, has shown no signs of collapse. (There are few “literary” writers today who don’t shape their prose with great care. Even a “plainspoken” style bows to Style.) In this sense, Bellow’s prose is both typical and extraordinary: one more flame in the undying bonfire of modernism.
    Another reason I doubt this anecdote: The prose isn’t poetry. It is too laden with description, too flabby with adjectives, too bogged down and boggy with its own exhaustive catalogs. Anti-poetic, too, is Bellow’s taste for caricature, for delineating the grotesque and the beautiful with the strokes of a cartoonist – strokes that, for all their color and abundance, tend to obscure grotesquery and beauty alike. In Herzog, Bellow’s early-60s blockbuster, the eponymous hero describes his ex-wives and -girlfriends in the hard-breathing manner of an undersexed Hooter’s patron. Here is Herzog reflecting on the comelier features of his Argentine mistress: “Ramona with her intoxicating eyes and robust breasts, her short but gentle legs, her Carmen airs, thievishly seductive, her skill in the sack (defeating invisible rivals)….” A few lines later, as if to complete her portrait as a sex robot, Ramona concedes to the needy Herzog, “But I know better than to be proud and demanding. Life has taught me to be humble.” And yet Bellow intends us to take this woman seriously; caricature, in such moments, becomes much more than a flaw in the prose.

Probably thinking of adjectives

    Bellow uses similar stampedes of detail to describe his less fortunate characters. In Herzog, the hero’s lawyer, Sandor Himmelstein, is presented as something of a monster: “He was a short man, misshapen from the loss of part of his chest. In Normandy, he always said…. [T]his dwarf and hunchback was disabled by a mine near the beachhead…. [T]hat was Sandor, with a proud, sharp, handsome face, pale mouth and sallow skin, grand nose, thin gray hair.” The use of adjectives here, particularly in the description of Himmelstein's face, is typical of Bellow. What may seem vivid in theory becomes, in the act of reading, a traffic jam of detail, with each descriptor laying on the horn, desperate to exert its own meaning. The resulting clamor is both sloppy and easy to imitate. In fact, Bellow sometimes seems to imitate himself, as in his description of Polina, Herzog’s ex-mother-in-law: “She was frugal, arid, clean, respectable and domineering. But there was nothing so tart, sweet, soft, and fragrant as her strudel made with brown sugar and green apples.” These short, packed, muddled yet sonorous sentences cry out for a thorough re-reading.
    Bellow remains, however, one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, and Auden’s protests – whether fictional or not – are obviously misplaced. Bellow may have flirted with verse, but his genius lies in the rhythms of prose: in the cascading of his clauses, the momentum of his paragraphs, his simultaneous fluency in the slang of Chicago and the cant of Academe. But the ultimate sign of his greatness, for me, is that I cannot read him without yearning, myself, to write like him. I’ll leave the last word to another of my heroes, John Cheever, who once described Bellow as a “brother” and a “real explorer.” Writing in his journal of a 1961 meeting of the Yaddo board of directors, Cheever admits that he’s intimidated by his friend’s vast talents: “During the meeting my own personality seems dispersed. I seem further demolished by the white of Saul’s eye. I wonder foolishly at the supremacy of his creative energies.” Whether those energies were indeed supreme is a discussion for another post, but the fact still stands: Bellow was a genius, and his genius emerged not in poetry, but in sentences – in the iconic bounce of his majestic, musical, adjective-rattling prose.


Two of my heroes (and a painting by my brother)

The Tender Specificity of Roland Barthes

        My attraction to Roland Barthes – which was immediate and intense – began as a kind of recognition. In the charming imperiousness of Mythologies (an authority that seduced me, that brushed past my defenses with disarming erudition and humor), I recognized my ticket to a pure superiority – intellectual political, moral. At the age of twenty-one, I was starving for this power (though I’m not sure I knew this myself). If Barthes, dismantling the structures that give us detergent ads and Lego sets, could rupture the very fabric of middle-class life – a life I was coming increasingly to disdain (a form of self-disdain, no doubt) – couldn’t I, simply by reading him, step outside and above these same ugly structures? I mistook his sensitivity for smugness, and I adopted this smugness as my own. I shrank just as much as I grew.

But now, six years later, as I read Camera Lucida, I see the limits of my previous reading – the limits of pure criticism. Through love, the inconsolable love of mourning, Barthes steps beyond the structures that, in Mythologies, confine him to a critical parlor trick. Camera Lucida is not an act of reduction, dissection, and dismissal; it is an exercise in tenderness, in transcendence through the particular.

Delineating the tension between the Mother as Figure and the exquisite specificity of his mother (who had died two years before), Barthes writes:

I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother…. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (Camera Lucida 75)

For my own part, I am learning – much too slowly, perhaps – not to read or write as a means of fostering distance. It is true that the clichés of ideology are dangerous, and we must always seek to dismantle them. But just as important (if we can remain ever wary of pre-structured falsehood) is the recognition of another’s humanity, of its “radiant, irreducible core.”

Reversing the Canon: The Enduring Strangeness of Henry James

Certain artists fall into that small but worthy company of “non-influential geniuses” – men and women whose innovations are so unconventional and jarring (and sometimes perverse) that they establish the artist as unquestionably great without, in turn, inspiring a wave of epigones and acolytes. A classic example is the multi-instrumentalist and composer Eric Dolphy, whose playing was too ingeniously personal for anyone to rip off entirely – or with any real success. And though Dolphy is an important figure in the history of jazz (his recordings are enduring, exciting illustrations of the tension between form and freedom in music), his relative lack of “influence” becomes obvious when you contrast him with, say, Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman. The point being, I guess, that some great artists are just too strange and irreducible to spark entire movements, to install themselves as masters in schools of their own art.

For the past month or so, I’ve been mulling over this concept, wondering how it applies (or, more likely, doesn’t apply) to the novelist Henry James. For someone like me, who until recently had read only a few of James’s briefer, breezier hits (Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, The Europeans), the notion of James as “non-influential” might seem ridiculous. Constantly in print, firmly ensconced in university syllabi, frequently invoked in the interviews and essays of our greatest living novelists, James towers over American and English letters simultaneously, straddling their canons like some bookish but eagle-eyed Colossus of Rhodes. Yet for all of James’s eminence, I don’t know many peers who’ve actually read him, besides the rare English major who slogged through (or SparkNoted) The Portrait of a Lady. And beyond the specialists and scholars in their cloisters, I can’t think of many readers who are dying to invest in cinderblock novels about naïve American ex-pats and the malevolent Euro-types who, armed with savage Old World wiles, seduce and destroy their lamblike New World counterparts. It all reeks too much of petticoats and mothballs and – far worse – of privilege. In the age of Trump, the era of the iPhone and the drone, the last rickety precipice before what may well be complete ecological collapse, James’s premises and themes (to say nothing of his prose) can seem profoundly, goofily irrelevant.

But none of this stopped me from plunging, at the start of my first summer break as a teacher, into James’s late, lengthy masterpiece The Wings of the Dove. There were plenty of reasons to do so: I had the time, and I had seen James praised so often by so many of my literary heroes (Woolf, Gass, Ford, Brodkey), and I wanted, finally, to read something “major,” to plug up one of the countless holes in my learning. Now, after a month of see-sawing rapture and bafflement, ecstasy and scorn, I’m glad I did it – and proud, too, that I actually finished the damn thing. At the same time, however, I’m confused by the mystery of James’s lasting importance and the utter weirdness of his prose and narrative techniques – a strangeness made all the stranger, in the case of The Wings of the Dove, by the fact that I’d never read anything like it. Yet what, beyond my considerable ignorance of the Victorian novel, could this weirdness signify? What, after all, does it mean for a book or its writer to be “Jamesian” when James’s own books resemble almost nothing else? If we can’t exactly call Henry James a “non-influential genius,” then we at least have to own up to the fact that his approach to fiction seems incomprehensibly foreign in 2019, as if James were not only from a different century, but from a different planet altogether.

First, a brief synopsis, so that everything that follows will make, I hope, a shred of sense. James begins The Wings of the Dove by introducing Kate Croy, a beautiful, middle-class Londoner who’s fallen on hard times. At the novel’s start, Kate (whose mother is dead, and whose father is a scandal-prone gambler) accepts an ultimatum from her wealthy Aunt Maud to join the latter’s household – if and only if Kate will disown the rest of her family. Meanwhile, Kate and her secret, impoverished fiancé, Merton Densher, seek a way to legitimize their union in the eyes of the disapproving Aunt Maud. When Milly Theale, a sickly but moneyed American heiress, alights upon the scene, Kate manipulates Merton into seducing the girl. Her hope is that Milly will die, leaving her millions to Merton, who will then have the money to wed Kate on the up-and-up.

This is the baroque, booby-trapped stage on which James enacts his drama, the strutting, measured, polyphonic strangeness of his mature style.

Henry "Hank" James

The standard critical rap on James is that he pioneered a new focus on interiority, turning routine social and emotional observations into dense, pages-long paragraphs of abstract psychological exploration. This is a technique the modernists – especially Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner – adopted and developed to an extreme. But in late James novels like The Wings of the Dove, the near-constant passages of interiority – studded though they are with gemmy glimpses of the characters’ actual thoughts – always retain the sound of James’s sensitive yet godlike authorial voice. There are no Woolfian moments of unfiltered yearning, no Joycean grunts or belches or farts. This final point is anachronistic, of course, a bit like blaming the ancient Sumerians for not having invented the automobile. But James’s interiority is almost impossibly dense, a bosky thicket of vague antecedents and even vaguer abstractions – a style that’s responsible, in the end, for some of the most difficult, infuriating prose I’ve ever read. The following passage, in which the shrewd Kate assesses her recent familial setbacks and her relationship with Aunt Maud, is typically obscure and long-winded, verging on the Ciceronian:

[Kate] had almost liked, in these weeks, what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother, the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial, of her having to recognise that should she behave, as she called it, decently – that is still do something for others – she would be herself wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly postponed was the question of a surrender, though she couldn’t yet have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything – that was at moments the way it presented itself – to Aunt Maud’s looming “personality.” It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious, and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she compared herself to a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness. (36-7)

Early as it comes in the novel, this passage makes only slightly more sense in context than it does outside of it. That’s not to say, however, that it’s a particularly tricky stretch of Jamesian prose; we understand immediately that Kate finds her aunt intimidating, a fact James communicates vividly in the final images of the trembling kid and the lioness’s jaws. But any sane editor or writing teacher, presented with this passage today, would bloody the page with red ink, would scalpel the fat (the enumeration of Kate’s family issues, all that gassy talk of “postponing power,” the pile-ups of tentative commas and adjectives) and keep only the so-called essentials. And if that teacher or editor is appropriately doctrinaire, they might even resort to that dusty but venerable slogan, “Show, don’t tell” – not realizing, all the while, that it was James himself who first uttered it. Further proof, I suppose, that the phrase has always been meaningless.

This late Jamesian style did not, however, conquer the literary landscape of 1902. Even the author’s greatest admirers had certain reservations about The Wings of the Dove. Henry’s older brother William, writing in a letter of beautiful fraternal honesty, was ambivalent at best:

You’ve reversed every traditional canon of storytelling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean) and all with unflagging curiosity to know what the upshot might become. (458, emphasis in original)

At the risk of inserting myself into a century-old sibling rivalry, I’ll have to side with William on this one. Henry’s obstinate refusal to tell the story and, instead, to fiddle around with “innumerable” byzantine sentences is, of course, the book’s chief frustration, and the force and clarity of William’s complaint only underscore his brother’s baffling vagueness and obscurity. The letter ends, however, with a touching bit of encouragement (the kind of substantial pleasantry that makes reading old correspondence feel instructive, even enriching, in these dizzy days of email and emojis): “At any rate [your style] is your own, and no one can drive you out or supplement you, so pray send along everything else you do, whether in this line or not, and it will add great solace to our lives” (459, emphasis added). Thus William sanctions Henry’s sui generis creations, illuminating his confusion and his encouragement alike in a warm, true beam of brotherly love.

Hank and Willie James

But if you prefer more objectivity in your criticism, take this assessment, from an anonymous critic in the Times Literary Supplement of September 1902:

This is, we repeat, an extraordinarily interesting performance, but it is not an easy book to read. It will not do for short railway journeys or for drowsy hammocks, or even to amuse sporting men and the active Young Person. The dense, fine quality of its pages – and there are 576 – will always presuppose a certain effort of attention on the part of the reader; who must, indeed, be prepared to forgo many of his customary titillations and bribes. (481)

The titillation, one assumes, of clear, straightforward prose; the bribe, perhaps, of not withholding crucial plot points until the last possible moment, as James so often does, to maddening effect, throughout The Wings of the Dove.

I’m also ambivalent about James’s achievement in this novel. The book is, as the elder James attests, an entry in its own bewildering genre, a work that stupefies as much as it enlightens or enriches or entertains. Its themes, while drawn from universal waters, are muddied by what I can only describe as James’s elitism – racist and classist, sure, but above all cultural. This snobbishness is inconveniently knotted up with the novelist’s best features – his passion for precise language; his subtle, winking lyricism; his flashes of unpretentious wit; his complex portrayals of women; his artistic and intellectual rigor. These are commendable qualities for any writer, to be sure, but in James, each facet is colored by a tendency to dismiss as “vulgar” anyone or anything that falls below a certain standard of wealth, education, talent, or beauty. The following scrap of invective, taken from a letter to the novelist William Dean Howells, illustrates James’s unfortunate tangle of high artistic seriousness and bitter, snobbish entrenchment:

Of course, in our conditions, doing anything decent is pure disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but that’s in the day’s work. The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadére of Journalism, of the newspaper and the picture (above all) magazine, who keeps screaming “Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.” (456, emphasis in original)

The sympathetic modern reader will surely agree with much of James’s bitterness, his cry against commercialism and the shrinking of the human mind (our man would probably flip over the state of the average “Anglo-Saxon” – or, indeed, any – attention span in the age of listicles and “Now This” videos). But these complaints, no matter how righteous, still stink a bit of chauvinism, of polo clubs and Italian villas and servant-stocked, dark-curtained, men’s-only dining rooms.

James’s art, however, is one of patient accumulation, an art that demands much so that it can deliver much in return. Two such scenes of intense cumulative beauty will always stick out for me when I remember The Wings of the Dove – one a veritable set piece, the other a moment of tender reflection. The first scene occurs in the novel’s latter half, as the hapless, passive Merton Densher realizes that his fiancée Kate actually wants him to seduce the dying Milly Theale so that he (and thus Kate) will inherit her massive American fortune. As Merton and Kate discuss the implications of this plan at a crowded Venetian soiree, their victim catches sight of them from across the room: “Milly, from the other side, happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth” (310). In the context of the novel, this moment is almost impossibly loaded, so that each of Milly’s attributes lands with a terrible iron thud; this list of attributes, meanwhile, ends not with the “value of her life,” but with the “essence of her wealth” – a crucial detail that indicates Milly’s true value in the calculations of her “friends.” Later, when Milly has died, Merton’s odd mixture of guilt and scrupulous pride gives way to an even stranger, more surprising emotion: he has fallen in love with the girl, in love – in a complex, deeply Jamesian way – with the awful romance of her death. James communicates this fact with great subtlety, through the layered conceit of Densher’s love as both a child and a cherished, delicate curio:

The thought was all his own, and [Kate] was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. (398)

Moments later, this love (or, more accurately, this loss) is expressed as a sound, a “faint far wail” that Densher actually savors: “This was the sound he cherished when alone in his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it” (398). This paradox of grief and guilt and pleasure captures the complexity not only of Densher’s fictional soul but also of James’s art. The master’s dizzying networks of abstraction, his refusal to be brief or blunt, his sensitivity to every shade of human feeling – each demanding aspect of his work combines in rare, precious moments like this one, moments of otherwise ineffable tragedy and beauty. Moments, in the end, of unexpected soulfulness. It is in such flashes that the question of influence becomes frankly banal, a coarse, harsh din, to be tuned out in deference to the infinite subtlety, the fine, faint music of James’s genius.

Note: All quoted material is derived from the Norton Critical Edition of The Wings of the Dove, ed. by J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (1978).

You can't beat a good Norton Critical Edition. I got this bad boy for a buck at the Latter Library in New Orleans (my local favorite).