Interview with a vampire reader

Chastened for criticizing a novel I had not read, I set out to read said novel, Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, and thus be able to discuss it from an informed point of view. ((See my post s on must reads and/or what constitutes a literary classic along with the comments.)

I’ll start with a positive. Rice is a good raconteur. Her narrative style is the right blend of dialogue, narration, and description. The disturbed, repellent characters are depicted in great detail and carefully drawn. Places, too, are vividly portrayed.

I’m forcing myself to finish the book. The subject matter is lurid and objectionable, dark and macabre. But this isn’t just a ghost story. Its insidious side is evinced in that the vampires are attractive, naturally, and the act of sucking blood is depicted as highly sensual — the ultimate experience.  That’s disgusting and for me offensive. Descriptive tales of how a person is tracked down and drained of his life blood, often with great pleasure in a spirit of fun, is reprehensible and appeals, as does such prurient literature to the basest nature. 

I’ve read 200 pages and I can’t find anything to take away from the book, nothing here enriches, elevates, informs, or pleases. It’s like falling deeper and deeper into a dark bottomless hole. What is Rice’s purpose?

I’m waiting to read any criticism until after I’ve finished, sometime Monday maybe. I’ve been told that there is heavy-duty philosophy here and perhaps I’ll find it in those remaining 150 pages.

First attempts by Ayn Rand

  I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy.  He was one of those invited into the salon circle of disciples where Rand discussed her views.

For one thing, what the unpublished writings offer is her early struggle with the English language. She had emigrated to America from Russia in 1926 at 21 and had to learn everything from scratch. But the stories show the maturing of a great writer. In “The Husband I Bought” the language usage is rough, and the diction is imprecise.  The plotting is immature with more telling than showing. But the men and women, her characters, are predictive of the giants of fiction that Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are today — people of strength and integrity and self reliance.

Having read Buckley’s Getting it Right, an enjoyable and fairly accurate fictional account of the formation of the conservative movement, I know that Rand didn’t support Buckley or The National Review. She thought it “the most dangerous” publlication in America since she felt that Buckley wanted to merge conservatism with religion. He didn’t favor some of her views, which were conservative, but Godless. The novel is just plain good reading.

I reject Rand’s views of religion and some of her views on man. I thoroughly relish her postulations that show man as heroic, purposeful, determined, the ruler of the world, capable of anything for his own self interest and thereby the good of others. It’s a vision that lauds man’s creativity and ability to produce and to derive from his efforts a deeply abiding satisfaction, confidence, and love of life — capitalism. (Some of the works in this anthology are vehemently anti-Communist.)

In her fiction, the evil characters are the lazy, inferior men who resent and envy those who do produce and are successful. Her fictional situations show people who are despised for their want of vision and talent — characters who function best in at atmosphere of regulation and bureacracy enforcing status quo operations and considering anyone who is not content with that and cannot abide mediocrity a threat. The bad guy is a jealous, petty man.

Peikoff recommends reading the novels first and then trying the early work. I agree that this makes a fascinating study.

You might enjoy these articles:

From The Atlasphere, bio and some good articles on social and political topics, mostly conservative

On Rand  — http://txpayervoice.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayn-rands-birthday.html

Manybooks.net has only Anthem available free online and as an audiobook here.

 

Rejection

Who faces rejection more than would-be writers and others who attempt to market their creative produce? You go to work on the text, hands trembling over the cold keyboard. You criticize yourself after every keystroke: immature, trivial, repetitive, boring, banal. Then the seed germinates. It grows. Oh yeah, you’re humming now — for about 250 words — then — nothing.

Strretch. Walk to the frig. Nothing there either. You know eating and drinking are only distractions. Back to it.

If you finish something, there’s the whole agent/editor/publisher routine if we’re fortunate enough to get that far. Most writers don’t. Most labor away unnoticed, unread, unpublished. But take comfort! Fitzgerald had a stack of rejection slips a few inches high. More recently, Jasper Fforde received 76 rejection letters from publishers before his first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2001 J.K. Rowlings (Harry Potter) was rejected 12 times! There’s a lesson here. Maybe.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf keeps an archive of its rejection files at the University of Texas. While the publisher has published some 47 Pulitzer winners, it has also said “No, thanks” to many that went on to fame.  In a review of these files in the NYT Sunday Books page, David Oshinsky says that reader reports that he encountered were fair, that rejections were most often deserved. Wanna-be’s should keep a balanced view.

That said, George Orwell was told. “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA” when he submitted Animal Farm.

Discouraged about rejection? I wouldn’t mind joining the ranks of these “rejects:”

Dr. Seuss
Upton Sinclair
Vladimir Nabokov
Stephen King for Carrie — “negative utopia stuff won’t sell”
Ayn Rand
Anne Frank — 15 rejections before Doubleday took Diary of a Young Girl
Isaac Singer
Jack Kerouac
Sylvia Plath
Rudyard Kipling
H.G. Wells
Margaret Mitchell — rejected 38 times for GONE WITH THE WIND!

This site lists rejections of famous writers and some of the now-rued excerpts from publishers’ prematurely poor assessments. I like to read these. “Someday they’ll be sorry! “
http://www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm

Misogyny and gullible women

Jincy Willett’s catchy title for her 2003 novel, The Winner of the National Book Award, is about a novel that did win the coveted award in the book. Willett’s didn’t, but is nonetheless worth the read.  The fictional winning novel is about the narrator’s portly, promiscuous twin sister, who, along with her spinster twin, befriends a poet and his wife, his old college roommate now a successful writer of salacious horror novels, and a small assortment of artsy oddballs.

While much of the book is about the amusing differences between the two sisters, these are highlighted by their relationship to the horror writer., Conrad Lowe. Conrad is handsome in a slippery, used-car salesman way, but possesses intelligence, wit, and a keen inerest in women. The wise, spinster twin shuns his flirtations; the looser twin falls in love.

The abuse starts on the honeymoon — verbal abuse, physical abuse, humiliations galore including Conrad’s tying her to the bed so that she can’t eat and will therefore lose weight. She is heavy, but healthy.  Her husband constantly humiliates her in front of the group about her size. But she is in love, she tells Dorcas, her twin, who urges her to leave him.

But a funny thing happens. Conrad begins to show attention to Dorcas the hook being needing her input on his work, she being a librarian. Dorcas, who has had absolutely no attention from men, takes the bait and spends an evening getting smashed with Conrad –drunk to the point of tying his shoe laces together under the table. She’s never been silly before.

Dorcas moves in with the couple at Abby’s insistence (to make Conrad happy and less abusive) and things go well for a while. Months pass.  Literary discussions occur nightly,  salon style. But Conrad slips into his old ways and is as nasty as ever even persuading the whole enclave minus Dorcas to have an “intervention” to help “save” his wife. It is cruel, but Abby gains strength through it, throws things, a kind of release happens.

Things settle down again. On Dorcas’s last night with the H.C. (Happy Couple) Conrad slips to the side of her bed, kisses her, holds her and . . .  alas, she rises and returns the embrace – with gusto. Three seconds later Conrad whispers, “Perfect” and leaves the room. She, of course, to her chagrin, knows exactly what has happened. This abusive man has done all this to prove a point. Not to Dorcas, but to himself: I am Conrad Lowe –destroyer of women. Another one bites the dust.

Conrad, though he has had plenty of women, actually despises them. His mother had been an actress and the young Conrad had been privy to her own many sexual indiscretions (indiscretions being mild.) He loved his father and hated his mother. Result? Women are evil. Mother must be punished.  The best way to punish women is with simpatico. “I understand. I feel your pain.”

After a separation then a reunion then more abuse, Abby calls Dorcas one day to report that there’s been an accident. She has backed the car over Conrad. Eight times! They laugh. The poet’s wife writes the book about Abby and Conrad and wins the National Book Award.

Through it all, both of the twins grow emotionally — Dorcas realizes that she, the old maid, is a woman and is suseptible to a man’s unique “gifts.” Abby realizes that she is an adult and need not suffer at the hands of a man, no matter how gifted.  After having starved to please him over their short, fatal marriage, she gains her weight back . After she murders him. In prison she’s happy.

The novel’s structure has some collage, flashback, and detours about New Englanders and “really bad weather” which are entertaining as backdrop for this grim, but humorous story.

“The horror, the horror”

Conrad’s singular phrase from the turn-of-the-century novella, Heart of Darkness, says it all.  So many have borrowed from it, the best known work being Apocalypse Now, which is set in Vietnam instead of the Congo. Most people find the book a challenging read, but with a few pointers up front, it’s worth the effort.

First, the organizational structure is a frame story. The narrator, Marlowe, is sitting on a boat on the Thames as he relates his experience of a trip up the Congo River. The point of view is that of Coleridge’s “sadder but wiser” man in recollection. Marlowe had been a model British navy man — a young, company man, somewhat naive. His assignment was to travel to the Congo and retrieve a “superior” man, Mr. Kurtz, who has been out of contact with authorities. Along the journey Marlowe constantly hears tales of Kurtz’s excellent spirit, original genius, and business acumen. He is a legend.

At various stopping places along the route into the jungle (”rain forests” did not exist,) Marlowe, in his pristine white uniform, becomes disillusioned as he encounters mistreatment of the natives by the British soldiers, the oppressive heat, and the general purposelessness of British occupation and of daily routine. “(Recall that the interior of the “dark continent” had not been penetrated by white men until Dr. Stanley Livingstone, who, of course, named Victoria Falls.) Far  from home in the wild, Marlowe begins to slide into the same spirit of ennui and worse that had infected Kurtz.

After a number of dangers and strange acquaintances, Marlowe reaches Kurtz’s outpost, which is complete with human heads on the fortress’s walls. Kurtz, the excellent British specimen and “superior man” has set himself up as a god and keeps local natives in his service, including a black mistress. He profits obscenely from the ivory trade, butchered carcases everywhere. He has participated in and probably initiated what Conrad in 1899 will only call “unspeakable rites.” Cannibalism is intimated.

What Marlowe finds is a ruined, sick, small man. Kurtz is at the point of death as he is carried onto Marlowe’s boat to be rescued. But it’s too late. The dying man hasn’t been so free and excellent. He was, after all, a man, and in the geographical “heart of darkness,” he discovers and sees for the first time his own spiritual heart of darkness. He sank to depths of depravity and can’t handle it psychologically revealing himself to be not a paragon, but another weak man. He knows this and is so stricken by self awareness that his last words are a miserable “the horror, the horror.”

His end is that of the man of extreme giftedness and intelligence, of good reportage, who, in a place so far from home and the confines and boundaries of society (British culture,) oversteps, transgresses, suffers, and consequently dies a horrible death, though one of recognition in the end. 

Interestingly, Marlowe must go and inform The Intended, Kurtz’s very English fiancee back home. He lies to her telling her that her beloved’s last words were her name.  This symbolizes Marlowe’s return to society and its values and ways. His disillusionment is real, but he is able to go forward, but never the same. Everything is interpreted as a facade, whitewashed like so many European cities named in the book. But he survives and sits in the lotus position to tell the tale, like the Ancient Mariner, to others who may or may not profit.

With this background Conrad’s layered symbolism becomes accessible: the heat, the jungle, the river, the death, the darkness. It’s about the dark continent, then new and mysterious to the world, and it’s about the dark human heart, always the same.

If you are new to Conrad, persist through the stream-of-consciousness technique, general heaviness, and impressionistic imagery. A John Malkovich film version is available, but the Marlon Brando as Kurtz Apocalypse Now is better known. I don’t care for either.

The short list

As genres go, my ranking is essay, poetry, novel, drama, and short story. Last and for me least the short story is a worthy little type of fiction though, fairly modern in origin in its current form. Its ancestors are the medieval romance and the tale, noteworthy examples being Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Boccacio’s The Decameron, all framed stories with stereotypical characters and themes — in a good way.  Not until the 19th century when a demand for fiction published in magazines arose did the genre realize its full potential for character and plot development. And sales.

Hemingway, not known for verbosity, a cut-to-the-chase guy, once wrote this story: For sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn. He called it his best work.  Talk about potential.

The Best American Short Stories of 2007 is edited by Stephen King, who has much to say about the genre in his piece in the NYT Sunday Book Review “What Ails the Short Story.”  He writes “Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse . . .”

Generally the short story is from 3,000 to 15,000 words in length or as Poe said, short enough to be read in a single sitting. Beyond that the form becomes a novella or a novel. Excellent short fiction may be found in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, for example. (An old writer’s joke says that in order to get published in The New Yorker you write a story and then tear off the last page. They read that way. Kind of like their cartoons, takes a certain type.)

My short list comes from stories that I first read in college and go back to on occasion, stories I found while planning for teaching, or stories that I own as part of a collection or series. (I buy those The Best Essays of 1986 anthologies and such.) I’m not sure that the list is revelatory in any way. Should posterity find it they won’t piece together anything about their dead great-great-grandmother other than eclectic tastes.

Me and Miss Mandible                                     Donald Barthelme       (imaginative, an grown man in an elementary classroom)
How Much Land Does a Man Need?              Leo Tolstoy                   (heavy on values, wealth, greed)
How I Write My Songs                                     Donald Barthelme        (satire, humor)
Story of an Hour                                               Kate Chopin                   (death of a husband)
Why I Live at the P.O.                                     Eudora Welty                (southern humor as only we can do it)
Good Country People                                       Flannery O’Connor       (humor, southern gothic, religious hypocrisy)
The Chidren’s Story                                        James Clavell                  (cold war anti-Soviet, pro-patriotism)
The Cask of Amontillado                                 Edgar Allan Poe              (unreliable narrator, horror, irony)

A book you might have missed

Having taken more than my share of English classes means that I’ve read a lot of books I could have done without. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is an example. I should like it, but I don’t and don’t mind saying so. Add Moll Flanders, To Kill a Mockingbird, and nearly anything by Mark Twain.  (I actually like Moby Dick.)

 In a contemporary American literature class, I was introduced to the so-called Jewish School: Bellow, Roth, Malamud. Here were some writers I could read into the night. They have suffered; they know. Malamud is my least favorite in general, but his novel A New Life is probably my favorite non-classic book.

Ad copy gets it right when it declares the novel’s theme to be “once a loser, always a loser.”

Seymour Levin is a reformed drunk who becomes an English professor and takes a job across the country and figurative universe from New York — a midwestern, ultra-conservative liberal arts college. The farm kids don’t get him and neither does the faculty. But he is dedicated, painfully sincere, and doomed to failure.

When Levin arrives at the airport, the department head looks askance at Levin’s full beard and it’s downhill from there. The biggest crime is that Levin doesn’t want to use the good professor’s Fundamentals of English Grammar — a tome destined to kill any college course. And worse, the prof’s wife gets a crush on the young “radical.” Funny stuff.

 Office politics, disappointed love, and the end of a new career leave the quizzical Levin scratching his head as he drives away from the once-promising, lush, thoroughly American environs still the failure he was when he arrived. He’s not sure what happened, and neither are we. No enlightenment has occured. No epiphany. Only deja vu.  

Except the reader, for about 3oo pages,  has held in his heart sympathy and warmth for a far less-than-perfect, well-meaning, but doomed fellow human being who probably deserves what he got.