“I’d say you’re always involved personally with the biography you’re writing, no matter how hard you work to muss the trail.” That’s what friend and fellow author James Marcus told me some time ago.

He ought to know. He’s the celebrated author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, newly out with Princeton University Press. I’ve been following James’s long labor for a dozen years. It has been more than a “personal” saga for the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut.

I’ve been on the road, so I’m a bit late to the table. Here’s what Lawrence A. Rosenwald concluded in his New York Times review: “If this were a show — a staging of a masterpiece — I would pay good money to see it. Not because it is perfect or unprecedented, but because it is alive and provocative.“

More words. This from Connor Harrison’s in the U.K.’s Review 31:

Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. But Marcus has not written a traditional biography, though biography certainly occupies the majority of his book. Glad to the Brink is a personal text because it is about Marcus, the point at which Waldo became subjective, or when the former discovered in the latter something of ‘[h]is own secret biography [. . .] in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.’

“A portrait, then, is an appropriate subtitle, since it is made up as much of the sitter as it is of the paintbrush. Glad to the Brink moves from chapter to chapter, decided not by chronology or analysis, but by emotion; by proximity; the occasions when, as Marcus puts it, the spectre of American letters ‘spoke to me most directly’.

“The result is a flesh-and-blood Waldo, ageing and suffering the degradations of lecture tours and unwanted social calls, the humid nights spent with women and men on his mind, days and years worn into his desk, relatives passing out of his hands and into the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Marcus’s prose, as well as his choice of scenes, complements this physicality. Unlike Waldo, he is conversational, practical. ‘When do you become yourself?’ he writes in the first chapter. ‘[T]he question is trickier than it sounds. At birth, we are presented with the raw materials of identity. But these are almost random. They are winnings from a game of genetic roulette, just waiting to be cashed out. What comes next is a long trek down the wind tunnel of childhood, the buffeting impacts of family and society and religion.’”

Andrew Epstein writing in The Times Literary Supplement, which calls him a “marvellous stylist.” He writes: “For Marcus, Emerson ‘was an aphorist forever seeking the minimalist blow to the head.'”

In Albert’s Camus’ 1942 The Stranger, a French shipping clerk named Meursault shoots an Arab man on the Mediterranean beach. Algerian author Kamel Daoud retells Camus’ famous story from the point of view of the dead man’s family: “My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain ‘the Arab’ forever.” 

Another Look discussed The Stranger in 2015 – now we’ll read Daoud’s 2013 retelling of the story, seventy years later. Please join us at 7 P.M. (PST) on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at the Stanford Humanities Center when Another Look presents Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. James Campbell,writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls it “a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history’s time warp.”

Panelists will include Stanford Prof.  Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.  

Stanford lecturer Michaela Hulstyn will round out the panel. Her Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Her research interests encompass the global French literary world, including texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium along with writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. 

Like Camus, Daoud was born in Algeria. He says Camus “cured” him in a time and place where ideology has become preeminent.  “His priority is not an ideology, but his life, his body,” according to The Financial Times. 

“The problem was I liked doubt,” Daoud said.”I was deeply wary of totalitarian explanations. I was born in a collectivist period. The primary value was the group, not the individual. And I am profoundly individualistic.” He now lives under a fatwa.

We are announcing our fall event a little bit early, to allow you time to revisit The Stranger and reacquaint yourself to Camus’s timeless classic. You’ll want to keep it handy.

Register on the link below:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_z2rkF4XhS1ay3pIoJvFJAg

It’s possible to get too much writing advice from famous writers, but so far I don’t think I’ve hit that threshold. I love hearing other writers explain what “works” for them. So below, some long-ago advice Oxford don and Narnia expert C. S. Lewis, shared with an American schoolgirl way back in 1959.

Incidentally, Lewis famously answered every letter he got, no matter who the sender was. Consequently, he spent hours every day in correspondence.

As for the letter below, my favorite chunk of advice is #6. I’ve long adhered to it: “When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abadoned years earlier.” (I should add that many large plastic bins stored in the garage testify to my adherence to this advice.)

Patrick Kurp, host of the matchless blog Anecdotal Evidence, doesn’t write reviews often. Why? Because he has posted on his blog daily, literally daily, for many years now. How does he do it? (We at the Book Haven wish we could say the same about our own humble efforts!) So when he does write a review in addition, it something of an event.

On the website On the Seawall, hosted by Ron Slate, Patrick Kurp considers Arthur Krystal’s A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now & Some Unfinished Business: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Krystal.

An excerpt:

A Word or Two Before I Go is his [Krystal’s] fifth collection of essays and in it he returns to several of his abiding hobbyhorses, including Jacques Barzun, boxing and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some Unfinished Chaos is Krystal’s first book devoted to a single subject and it often reads like a set of linked essays. No one is likely to read his Fitzgerald biography for the day-to-day details of the novelist’s life, which are thoroughly documented elsewhere. Krystal was drawn to him by The Great Gatsby and the rest of the fiction, but he stuck around for Fitzgerald’s intriguingly complicated and very American character.

One of the epigraphs to the biography, borrowed from the novelist himself, succinctly poses Krystal’s approach: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He’s too many people if he’s any good.” Krystal resists reducing Fitzgerald to a tidy thesis and defies the tendency to romanticize his alcoholism and the Jazz Age. He lauds the novelist’s professionalism: “[H]e could barely function without a drink, so when he sat down to write, he exercised a control absent elsewhere in his life.” In Fitzgerald he has found his ideal subject, a writer whose life mingled self-destructiveness, immaturity and a literary gift almost unmatched among American writers of fiction:

“One minute you want to hug Fitzgerald, the next you want to wring his neck, not because he was a moralist who behaved like a swine, or a romantic who behaved like a vulgarian — one can chalk that up to booze and false bravado — but because it’s difficult to know when to trust him.”

Since Montaigne, essays have served as literature’s formless form. Almost anything goes. Krystal, typically, is uneasy with the designation “essayist.” It is, he writes, “too grand and too definitive and yet at the same time restrictive.” Krystal is a storyteller even in his essays. He’s an anecdotalist and, the reader suspects, a novelist manqué (he wrote several as a young man, never published). 

Read the whole thing here. It’s short. Meanwhile, you might also enjoy today’s post on Anecdotal Evidence. It begins:

On Thursday I gently slipped my brother some Montaigne without him knowing the source. It wasn’t plagiarism, exactly, and it was paraphrased. It’s a well-known passage from the essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” one that always reminds me of Spinoza: 

“It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.” Read the rest here.

Interest in René Girard from an unexpected source: the current issue of Air Mail, which describes itself as a “mobile-first digital weekly that unfolds like the better weekend editions of your favorite newspapers.” Dramatist, novelist, and poet Matthew Gasda writes: “We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuroses at the turn of the last century.”

Gaspa is a voice worth listening to. Two years ago, the New York Times noted: “Matthew Gasda spent years writing plays on his electric typewriter, and almost no one seemed to care. With Dimes Square, his depiction of a downtown crowd, he has an underground hit.” And so he’s been a voice worth listening to ever since.

Which is especially good for All Desire is a Desire for Being, just out with Penguin Classics U.S. (The U.K. edition was published last year.) You can buy the book here. Meanwhile, read Gasda’s review of the book.

He continues: “While Freud was renowned in his own time, Girard, who died in 2015, is still far from a household name. A distinguished scholar and the author of nearly 30 books, he never broke through to a mass audience like his contemporary Harold Bloom, who transitioned from high theory to cultural critiques in the 1990s. Girard was not a public intellectual; he was a quietly influential, if recondite, academic: the Velvet Underground, not the Beatles.”

“Just as you don’t need to be a Marxist or a Freudian to find class struggle or the Oedipus complex useful, you do not need to be a Girardian, or a Catholic, to find Girard useful. Girard’s dogged attention to what he calls, echoing Nietzsche, the ‘eternal return’ of the scapegoat mechanism (the cruelty and stupidity of the mob) deserves our attention. Girard warns us, with moving pathos, that we are always on the verge of reprising the horrors of history; we are still prone, especially in times of crisis and change, to retribution and revenge (digital or physical).”

He continues: “All Desire Is a Desire for Being is not a reissue but a new collection of essential essays and aphorisms selected by [Cynthia] Haven. It’s the ideal way to read Girard, who only ever had one big idea. He was the kind of thinker Isaiah Berlin would have called a hedgehog, not a fox. But what an idea. Mimetic rivalry is a profound and disturbing discovery, and Girard dedicated his long and distinguished career to its explication. If he is right, we have to question whether the world we are actively creating—or perhaps passively re-creating—is not very, very wrong.”

Read the whole thing here. The bad news: it’s behind a sort of a paywall. The good news: all you have to do is include your email address at the bottom of the page to get access. Enjoy.

I paid a visit to an old friend today. Last time we visited was six years ago at her temporary digs in Wawel Castle, on a bitterly cold winter day in Kraków – and Polish winters have a sharp bite that has to be experienced to be believed. She was only about two feet away from my face, and no one else was around – as a friend observed, the experience changes when you can see the craquelure up close.

Today she seems to have found a more permanent home at the Muzeum Czartoryskich. Leonardo da Vinci’s 21″ x 15″ oil painting is one of Poland’s great treasures. Stanford archist Elena Danielson described her as “wonderful in person, and much finer and far more mysterious than the Mona Lisa.”

Joy Zamoyski Koch commented on the provenance of the painting: “Lady with an Ermine was purchased in 1798 by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski for his mother (my 4th grandmother) Princess Izabella and incorporated into the family art collection at Pulawy (which is also a museum worth visiting).

“She rescued it from the invading Russian army in 1830, sent it to Dresden, then to Czartoryski family in exile in Paris, and finally to Krakow in 1882.

“In 1939, the Germans seized it and sent it to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. The following year, Hans Frank, the Governor General of occupied Poland, requested its return to Krakow. In 1945 it was taken to Frank’s country home in Bavaria, where it was duly liberated by American troops who returned it to the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.”

Said one of my bros: “Very cool! I have liked that painting for many years – the ferret and girl have the same look on their faces.” How many people have noticed that?