Reading is Writing #5: Reflections and a great Irish story
What are we doing here? Writing about writing about writing.
I’ve been having trouble writing.
Every idea seems half-assed, even this. Every sentence is inadequate.
The American regime tried to disappear Mahmoud Khalil this week. He is neither the first, nor the last man to be snatched by the fascist thugs in the employ of the U.S. government* but the glee, dishonesty and publicity attending Khalil’s disappearance make it difficult to think of anything else. While public resistance has forced the anti-Palestinian Democrats to stand up for the Khalil, his initial disappearance is a clear attack on political liberty and resistance to the Israeli genocide. If they can disappear a permanent resident, a well-known man accused of no crime, from the middle of New York City, they can disappear a citizen.
It is the logic of the War on Terror brought to its inevitable end: any dissent from America is treason, Israel’s sanctity trumps realpolitik calculations of imperial interest. All law can be suspended to serve those principles.
Between that reality and the nauseating takeover of the administrative state by capital’s shock troops, it feels irresponsible, even cowardly, to write about books. Our enemies are on the offensive and here I am, head down in the trench, telling stories about stories.
Writing a Substack essay isn’t going to get anybody organized. People get organized because of their social connections to others and their commitment to a collective that extends beyond the self. Pierre Broue quotes one of Germany’s doomed communists speaking about the situation in 1923: “A friend cuts our criticisms short; he says: ‘I believe in the revolution because I want it, and I live with men who want it.’” (Broue, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, page 773) One does not face down power solely out of ideological commitment; the factor that tips someone from a disgusted bystander to a participant in history is that sense of solidarity, of living with people who want it.
But I do believe that thinking about literature and culture is part of the intellectual work that creates and refines the analytical and moral tools for understanding the present. When we abandon the project of thinking through art critically, of making ourselves more complex, more rounded as people what we are really surrendering is the idea that we can participate democratically in cultural production. I don’t want to surrender that idea and I don’t think you want to, either.
In any case, I promised you, dear readers, that I would write something about every book I read for my MFA. I intend to keep that promise in spirit. Later in this post we’ll talk about Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor, which has one of the most elegant short story endings I have ever encountered, and we will talk in less detail about Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt and Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry.
I say less detail because I no longer intend to write several hundred words about each book; instead I will write what is required of my MFA program—two critical essays a month and a longer critical paper at semester’s end—and accompany this with very simple commentary on other books. There are three reasons for this.
The first is that some of these books are not fun to write about. Writing about Michael Cunningham’s The Hours was like squeezing blood from a stone for me. I count Schutt’s Pure Hollywood to be technically competent, but I did not find any of the stories in it memorable enough to warrant 300 words. Part of learning to read is learning that there are stories to which one simply does not have a response.
The second reason is that I have a job and, for reasons I cannot detail here, that job is likely to be extremely busy for the next while. Living in Washington D.C. is also likely to get extremely busy soon—very soon if my instincts are correct. I believe there will be upsurges in popular resistance later this year that are more broad-based than the anti-genocide protests of 2023-5 and likely less massive, but more sustained and more violent in their repression than the summer of 2020. When ordinary people put their bodies on the line to stop American shock therapy from being applied to America, I intend to do my part. I hope you will too.
The third reason is that you all don’t seem to like the homework essays all that much. Engagement on the Reading is Writing posts is typically lower than standalone essays (though not as low as on the short story, which is cool lol, I’m embarrassed by that piece). And that’s fine, there’s a wide tonal variation between these essays and it must be jarring to go from a movie review about how Emilia Perez is so bad we should go to war with France to an essay about how writing in direct imitation of Virginia Woolf is kind of gauche.
By cutting back on the full-length book essays to just what is required for my coursework I will be able to combine my book writing with more interesting theorizing/commentaries that I think will be fun to read and fun to write.
There are interesting things to be said about reading, writing, literature and politics, but probably not in mandatory book reports. And I said at the beginning of this project that I intended to make public the intellectual labor of getting an MFA. A big part of that labor is not reading, but the painful emotional work of writing stories that are not, in their current forms, good or even coherent; pulling back on the book reviews will give me the time to do that work and to write about it.
Let me know what you think of this below, and please share this blog with anyone you know who is interested in literature, especially if you think they won’t like it. I need more enemies.
Cheating at Canasta:
Cheating at Canasta is a late entry by William Trevor (1928-2016), a prolific Irish writer. The collection is set in Ireland and the UK in the late 20th and early 21st century, as Ireland was finally emerging from the backwards Catholic quasi-dictatorship that ruled the Republic for most of the 20th century. Trevor’s works are connected to those cultural changes: Cheating at Canasta captures the senescence of the mid-century Irish bourgeoisie and the emergence of new social sensibilities from the decay of that order. Infidelity, secrecy, aging and the denial of desire are the key themes that tie the work together. At a stylistic level, Cheating at Canasta is written simply, even plainly. But there is virtuosity in Trevor’s restraint.
Of all the books I’ve read so far for this program, Cheating at Canasta is the one that hit me the hardest. This is due to the simplicity and elegance of William Trevor’s narrative twists. For this annotation I will talk about one gutting moment in one story: “A Perfect Relationship,” and a couple similar moments elsewhere.
The plot of “A Perfect Relationship” is very straightforward. Chloë, a young woman, decides to leave Prosper, the older man with whom she has been in a relationship. Prosper is devastated. Chloë feels more ambivalent, but she feels lonely once she leaves him. Prosper tries to figure out where she has gone. Chloë comes back to their shared flat to return a key. She and Prosper talk, she decides she was wrong to leave him, he decides she was right.
When Chloë returns to the flat Prosper asks: “‘Why have you gone away, Chloë?’” (146). She begins to explain herself, she feels she must. She says why she left him, then feels she was wrong to do so: “‘I didn’t know it was a silliness,’ she said.” (146) A couple grafs follow in a close third from Chloë’s perspective; then it shifts.
“Prosper understood because he was quick to understand; and understanding nothing only moments ago, now understood too much.” (147). This shift is the fulcrum of the story.
Trevor gives us relatively little of their relationship itself. Three sentences on the same page are the clearest characterization of their bond: “They had discovered one another at a time when they were less than they became,” (147) and “[She] sensed its truth: that she had lost, and was losing still, a little of herself. With kindness, and delighting her, her life had been arrested, while hungrily she accepted what was on offer.” Still Trevor has Chloë note that this was more than many people ever found in love.
This restraint is what makes Trevor’s turn work. There are no dramatics. We are left to imagine the specifics of Chloë’s discomforts—an older man, an established life, the feeling that she is not growing, that he is feeding from her—all these the reader must create for himself. Our own emotional histories fill in for those of Trevor’s characters. That feeling of an unequal, but still satisfying, relationship is painful. It is a good pain.
It is also antithetical to the common interpretation of “show don’t tell.” Trevor refuses to take the indirect approach. He remains restrained through to the final paragraph, Prosper knows that Chloë has finally articulated her feelings on the relationship to him, that what she’d avoided saying in leaving him is now in the open. She seems to press for a resumption of the status quo. He waits, not out of cruelty or sadism, but out of that give and take that supplied the logic for their relationship. She has grown to know what he wants, and he has grown to have an awareness of her needs.
“Prosper didn’t want the night to end. He loved her, she gave him back what she could: he had never not known that. Her voice, still reminiscing, was soft, and when it sounded tired he talked himself and, being with her, found the courage she had found and lost. His it was to order now what must be, to say what must be said. There had been no silliness, there wasn’t a mistake.” (148)
There’s a nice flow to that language. I want you to read that paragraph aloud before you read the next one. Feel those sentences in your mouth. Knock on a table as you read the points of emphasis here, if you must.
Those last two sentences roll. ‘His it was to order now’—then the disruption of ‘what must be’, and starting again with the roll: ‘to say what must be said.’ Then two simple, declarative clauses, each ending in a longer word, a word Chloë herself has used. This reinforces the inversion of the character’s desires and shows the subtle irony at play. Chloë does not yet know that Prosper has decided things need to end, in the same way that Prosper began the story not knowing Chloë’s motivations.
But there’s a bit more to the story than simple reversal of desire. “A Perfect Relationship” ends with an older man regaining power in a relationship with a younger woman after he lost that power through the assertion of her desire for autonomy. We get Chloë saying this earlier: “At no stage in their relationship had he ever pressed her about anything.” (136). But the conclusion of their relationship comes with an imperative, it must be, Prosper says, though his precise words are kept from the reader. Here is the assertiveness, the emotional danger one expects in a short story about a younger woman in a relationship with an older man. But it’s still not to control Chloë, but to relinquish her. As I said above, the story turns on this reversal of Prosper’s desire; without it it’s a story of the disunion of two sad people and their partial reunion and that is too kind to be interesting. It’s hard to parse what Trevor means the reader to take from the past refusal of power on Prosper’s part—I take it to mean that he is what Chloë feared and their relationship would, in time, limit her. This is made all the more painful by Chloë’s effort to offer yet more of herself for a resumption of the relationship.
Other stories in “Cheating at Canasta” employ similar ironic fatalism, “Bravado,” and “The Dressmaker’s Child” spring to mind as stories where the end, once read, feels inevitable and weighty. Yet both are written quite simply.
I was hit hardest by the end of “Faith,” which follows an aging protestant priest, Bartholomew, in rural Ireland whose unmarried sister, Hester, is dying. The tone and pacing of her death are reminiscent of the same sad restraint in “A Perfect Relationship.” Trevor writes: “He reached out for her hand and felt it warm in his. ‘Thank you,’ he thought she said, but knew she had not. He gazed for a little longer at the dead features before he drew the sheet up.” (211)
This is another story about a man and a woman who want different things. Again the woman’s action drives their relationship; Hester volunteers Bartholomew to leave Dublin for a small town. Hester’s problem is physical, she dies at a relatively young age of an aggressive disease. Bartholomew’s problem is spiritual, he learns the futility of his calling from the rural parish’s gradual collapse. Yet here, as in “A Perfect Relationship,” it is a woman’s suffering—bodily now, emotional earlier—that gives a man his needed insight: “He stayed with her, the mercy of her tranquility seeming to be a miracle that was real, as it had been in the instant of death. Heaven enough, and more than angels.” (212)
What sets this apart are the stakes and the philosophical outlook. A woman dies in this story and her brother’s faith is partly redeemed. I don’t think he experiences this wholly as miracle, but as a confirmation that his sister was right to bring them out into the dying parishes and that he is right to persist in his impossible task. That the act of faith becomes the reality of faith is the central change here. It is a more pessimistic story than “A Perfect Relationship,” which ends with Prosper finding closure and Chloë set free. “Faith” kills one of its narrators and leaves the other in a sort of living purgatory, certain of his end and committed to it, yet not insulated from the pain.
I also read for school:
Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt. Did not make much of an impression, surprisingly little to do with Hollywood.
Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry. A lot of heartbreakers in this one. Some really funny ones too. I highly recommend. The first story in this collection is a tight little number about not being confident enough to make out at a party. I was personally injured by it.
A Moral Education by Garth Greenwell in the Yale Review. An essay on Philip Roth’s filth and the moral logic of art. My professor recommended this because I’ve been struggling with the fear of writing a story so mean spirited that readers (not you all surely!) might take its cruelty for an endorsement of evil.
For Fun:
What Hath God Wrought? By Daniel Walker Howe. Too friendly to Calhoun! Too nice to the mormons. Otherwise quite good, maybe essential if, like me, you vaguely remember the lessons of the Jacksonian era from high school history (The Tariff!).
The Dickey’s BBQ franchise disclosure document, courtesy of the state of Wisconsin.
Next Week: Visually obscured murders in Brad Watson’s Last Days of the Dog-men, and either some theses on the concept of reading or some talk about how to write short stories.
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*Nor even disappeared. Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki was vaporized without trial on Barack Obama’s directive, and Michael Reinoehl was assassinated on the personal orders of the president in September 2020. We must never forget their names or that they deserved fair, and public trials by impartial juries; that they had the right to be informed of the charges; to be confronted with the witnesses against them; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in their favor, and to have lawyers for their defense.
That the requirements of the Sixth Amendment were abrogated to assassinate these people is a disgrace. So too is the fact that there are many, many tens of thousands of people in this country locked up without any real due process, trial or defense. Even the worst criminal does not deserve torture or humiliation. There is an essential human dignity in all men and if we do not see it in the lowest it is because we have extinguished it in ourselves.