The Bourgeois Eric Hobsbawm

The famed Communist historian had distinctly non-Marxist views of high culture.

David A. Bell

August 26, 2014

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September-October 2014

Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2014), 336 pp., $27.95.

 

IN A FAMOUS exchange in 1994, Michael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm whether the vast human costs inflicted by Stalin on the Soviet Union could possibly be justified. Hobsbawm replied, "Probably not. . . . because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure." Do you mean, Ignatieff pressed him, that "had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm answered, "Yes."

Two years after Hobsbawm's death at the age of ninety-five, his lifelong, unapologetic Communism remains for many the most important thing about him. To his critics on the right, it discredits him, pure and simple. On the left, even some commentators who took more admirable stances on Communist tyrannies treat his steadfast commitment to the USSR as, to quote Perry Anderson, "evidence of an exceptional integrity and strength of character." They refer with something approaching reverence to the justification he formulated in his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times: "Emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original home, the October Revolution."

But in what ways did Hobsbawm's politics really shape the voluminous writings that made him one of the most famous historians of the past century? Certainly, the dynamic and destructive energies of capitalism constitute the central theme of his most famous work: the grand quartet of general histories that proceed from The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 to The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991. Without whitewashing Stalin's crimes, the last of these nonetheless argued that the Soviet example led directly to the West's adoption of Keynesian economics and the welfare state. Yet the books offered anything but a rigidly Marxist interpretation, and generally eschewed sharply polemical language. It is doubtful that a true Stalinist ideologue could have been saluted at his death (admittedly, by the Guardian) as "arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind," or received the title of "Companion of Honour" from Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. Niall Ferguson (hardly an ideological soulmate) called him a "truly great historian." Among the members of the left-wing student group called the Cambridge Apostles, it was Kim Philby, not Eric Hobsbawm, who actually went to work for Stalin, and lived out his final decades in lonely, crapulous Moscow exile.

Hobsbawm's posthumous book of essays, Fractured Times, gives considerable insight into the factors other than Communist politics that shaped his outlook—and that shaped it more strongly. Like most such collections it is something of a mixed bag, with forgettable book reviews and superficial lectures jostling for space with several trenchant and beautifully written essays. At first glance it also seems to be detached from the main themes of Hobsbawm's historical work—namely, capitalism, revolution, war and the "primitive rebels" against the social order whom he examined in his 1959 book of that title (the book that first brought him real fame). Fractured Times deals mostly with high culture in the twentieth century, in an unapologetically elitist tone. But it is precisely this subject matter and this tone that reveal something often overlooked about Eric Hobsbawm. For all his commitment to international Communism, he was also profoundly, if paradoxically, bourgeois, and in a distinctly Jewish way.

 

HOBSBAWM'S UPBRINGING was certainly that of a bourgeois Jew. His father came from a Jewish trade background in the East End of London; his mother was the daughter of a Jewish Viennese jeweler. Born in Alexandria in 1917, Eric spent his childhood in Vienna and then, from 1931, after the death of his parents, with an aunt and uncle in Berlin. Although English was the language of his homes, his larger middle-class milieu was characterized by a deep reverence for German high culture: Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven. In Berlin, amid the misery of the Depression and the turmoil accompanying the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the teenage Hobsbawm was swept into street politics. He later compared the intense experience of "participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation" to sex. But after Hitler's seizure of power the family relocated to London, where Hobsbawm finished his secondary education at that most middle-class of British institutions, the grammar school, and spent his spare hours reading Romantic poetry and listening to jazz, along with selling Communist Party pamphlets. From there, it was off to Cambridge, and his exceptionally long and productive intellectual career.

Politics, in fact, shaped this career less than many of Hobsbawm's obituaries suggested. His membership in the British Communist Party and on the editorial board of the party's main organ Marxism Today may have kept him from a glittering Cambridge professorship, and made travel to the United States difficult, but his position at Birkbeck College, University of London hardly amounted to Siberian exile. Nor did he do much of the actual street-level work—leafleting, picketing, organizing—of ordinary Communist militants (he famously chastised fellow left-wing historian and peace activist E. P. Thompson for neglecting historical scholarship in favor of political organizing). Like most intellectuals who had come of age in the thirties, Hobsbawm also had trouble taking the political and cultural upheavals of the sixties seriously. Rather than making common cause with the British New Left, he talked about the impending death of socialism and supported the New Labour movement eventually headed by Tony Blair. He proudly boasted that he had never worn blue jeans, and once attributed the success of rock and roll to "infantilism." His own musical passion remained jazz, which for many years he reviewed with great flair, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, for the New Statesman.

The essays in Fractured Times that deal with Hobsbawm's formative bourgeois Jewish milieu do so not just with insight, but also with respect. They take as a starting point the intense identification that middle-class European Jews of the late nineteenth century felt with their countries' high cultures: French, Russian, Hungarian and especially German. Throughout Central Europe, Jews seeking emancipation from the "self-segregation" of the shtetl (it was not, of course, entirely the Jews' own choice) found in German culture a path toward professional and social distinction. Embracing it, Hobsbawm notes, also proved the most effective way of separating themselves, in their own eyes as well as those of their gentile neighbors, from the uneducated, religious, Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses to the east. Hobsbawm also makes, quite keenly, another point: "The passion of emancipated Jews for the national languages and cultures of their gentile countries was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but clubs of which they could see themselves almost as founder members." What we now see as German high culture, at least in philosophy, literature and the visual arts (Kant, Goethe, etc.), took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as German Jews were first gaining civil rights and prominent positions in gentile society. In the great multilingual stew of Austria-Hungary, the Jewish passion for everything German was unrivaled (although in Hungary itself, some Jews did prefer the local vernacular). Hobsbawm offers as an example (twice!) the heavily Jewish town of Brody, in Galicia, once Austro-Hungarian, and subsequently Polish, Soviet and Ukrainian. In the nineteenth century, its principal languages were Yiddish and Ukrainian, but the Jewish town fathers nonetheless insisted that its schools adopt German as their language of instruction.

In these essays, Hobsbawm dwells on past Jewish achievements with something approaching ethnic pride. He enumerates Jewish Nobel Prize winners, and gives long lists of Jews who dominated their respective fields ("Heine, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Ricardo, Marx, Disraeli. . . . Modigliani, Pascin, Marcoussis, Chagall, Soutine, Epstein, Lipchitz, Lissitzky, Zadkine"). He speaks of the "enormous oilfield of [Jewish] talent . . . waiting to be tapped by the most admirable of all human movements, the Enlightenment." And this refugee from Hitler says of German culture: "Only those who have experienced the force, the grandeur and the beauty of that culture, which made the Bulgarian Jew Elias Canetti write in the middle of the Second World War that 'the language of my intellect will remain German,' can fully realise what its loss meant." It is no wonder that Hobsbawm was a devotee of Joseph Roth, the Jewish novelist who composed that piercing elegy for the German-speaking Habsburg Empire, Radetzky March.

Hobsbawm also perceptively notes that in many cases, Jews did not simply embrace high culture, but also ended up giving it a distinctly Jewish flavor. In Vienna, where the Jewish population soared from less than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 in 1914, Jews played an outsized role in shaping middle-class institutions, artistic genres and forms of humor (the same, it might be noted, was true of Budapest and, later, New York). By the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists were weaving more and more recognizably Jewish themes into their work. Hobsbawm muses that when it comes to Jewish cultural creativity, "a certain degree of uneasiness in the relationship between them and non-Jews has proved historically useful," pointing out that the end of the nineteenth century—the years of the Dreyfus Affair in France and the anti-Semitic Mayor Kurt Lueger in Vienna—was in fact a time of "maximum stimulus for Jewish talent."

 

IN NONE OF these essays does Hobsbawm let drop even a hint of contempt for the bourgeois settings in which the cultural developments in question took place. Unlike, say, Karl Marx, he does not poke beneath the surface of Enlightenment philosophy in search of a rancidly selfish "bourgeois ideology." And unlike the cultural radicals of the sixties, he does not reject high culture as the suffocating exhalations of a dead, white, male Establishment. Quite the contrary. He speaks of the Enlightenment with pure admiration, and at the end of the book laments the retreat of its values, "faced with the anti-universal powers of 'blood and soil' and the radical-reactionary tendencies developing in all world religions."

The chapters that deal with twentieth-century culture feel very similar in tone. Indeed, while Hobsbawm has characteristically smart things to say along the way, these essays also voice exasperation with cultural experimentation that sometimes verges on the curmudgeonly. Hobsbawm regrets the fact that so little contemporary classical music and opera reaches popular audiences, leaving performers to live on dead repertoires. "Overwhelmingly, operatic production . . . consists of attempts to freshen up eminent graves by putting different sets of flowers on them." Contemporary sculpture, he says, has a "miserable existence," while the break with pictorial representation a hundred years ago put avant-garde painting "on the way to nowhere." Indeed, Hobsbawm speaks of the "historic failure" of pictorial art in the twentieth century. As for philosophy, he writes, a little cringe-inducingly, that its practitioners can no longer compete with "Bono or Eno," or the "universal noise of Facebook." An essay simply titled "The Avant-Garde Fails," originally published in 1998, states, "Disney's animations, however inferior to the austere beauty of Mondrian, were both more revolutionary than oil-painting, and better at passing on their message."

These assessments may be defensible, but Hobsbawm, at least here, doesn't really try to defend them. Rather, he simply pronounces, and therefore sounds too much like an indignant middle-aged museumgoer circa 1950 expostulating about the dots and drips of abstract expressionism. At least he does not try to assign blame for the "failures," and makes sensible if unoriginal points about the way the invention of mechanical reproduction changed representational art. As early as 1850, he notes, critics were warning of the threat posed by photography to lithography and portraiture. But he leaves readers with the strong sense that he would have felt much more comfortable in the long-vanished cultural world of German-speaking Central Europe.

 

THESE EX cathedra judgments will hardly surprise longtime readers of Hobsbawm. One collection of his lectures bore the title Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes. Much of what he says in Fractured Times he also said there, and in his autobiography. His four-part world history brims with sharp, confident pronouncements on all manner of artistic and literary endeavors. But this new collection underlines Hobsbawm's belief in the essential autonomy of these endeavors. Politics and economics, in his view, can powerfully affect the arts—he considers periods of political anxiety and economic crisis particularly useful for spurring creativity. Technology can do so as well. But in no way can works be read primarily as reflections of their social and economic origins. For Hobsbawm, the difference between a bourgeois work of art and a proletarian one matters less than the difference between a good work of art and a bad one. In this, he not only indicates his own good sense, but also echoes the stance taken by the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, which embraced the idea of "art for art's sake" and believed that raising children in the properly "cultivated" manner meant equipping them with the ability to make proper critical distinctions.

In the preface to Fractured Times, Hobsbawm relates its essays to the larger themes of his historical work, and formulates the following thesis. "The logic of both capitalist development and bourgeois civilisation itself," he writes, "were bound to destroy its foundation, a society and institutions run by a progressive elite minority." Technological innovation, mass politics and above all the rise of "mass consumption" made it impossible for the educated bourgeoisie to dictate taste to the rest of the population, or even to preserve their own cultural practices and institutions. In a world of mass entertainment, swept by constant technological innovation and the ceaseless pursuit of the new, artistic and literary production could no longer consist primarily of adding a steady stream of fresh, critically approved works to a stable canon. The traditional forms themselves—orchestral music, opera, framed painting—waned, and the cultural initiative passed to the producers of film, television and rock music. Symphony halls closed while Hollywood grew fat.

It is a compelling thesis, one that jibes well with the story Hobsbawm told in his histories about the power of capitalism to make and unmake societies: to hasten revolution, transform living conditions, beget empires and finally lead the world into the massively destructive "age of extremes." But it does not cast capitalist development as the "structure" that determines the actual content of culture. And so it allows him, at least in part, to rescue the ideals that governed the bourgeois Jewish mitteleuropäisch world of his childhood from the cynical condescension of posterity. Hobsbawm freely admits the socially elitist nature of this world. He notes that on the eve of World War I, in Britain, France and Germany, only a tiny percentage of the population attended university. Total enrollment in higher education, out of a combined population of 150 million, barely reached 150,000. If pressed, Hobsbawm would certainly have conceded that even among these educated thousands, many came closer to the satirical figure known as the Spießbürger (the Philistine petty bourgeois) than to an embodiment of proper Kultur. He ends the preface with a frail paean to the "century of common men and women" which followed, and which produced new, original, hybrid art forms (jazz?), and he quotes the familiar mocking lines of "Prufrock" on the limits of bourgeois culture: "In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo." But in the end he cannot hide his fear that mass culture has fundamentally corrupted the arts, while the essays themselves, as noted, breathe with more than a little nostalgia for a world in which people did, at least, talk about Michelangelo.

 

AS A HISTORIAN, Hobsbawm's great strength was always as a synthesizer. He was not an "archive hound" who lived to track down new facts amid the dusty cartons of a provincial public-records office. Nor was he a theorist who cogitated in thick, jargon-filled prose about the ideological structures underpinning historical change. He relied heavily on the work of other historians, and his writing was enviably lucid, witty and accessible. He was in fact a master of this style of history, which has long flourished in Britain, but also has something in common with the entertaining works (Stefan Zweig's and Emil Ludwig's, for instance) that appealed to the history-reading public of prewar Central Europe. For these reasons, while fellow historians generally speak of Hobsbawm with great respect, they do not actually cite him very often. There was never a real "Hobsbawm School," and a generation from now, his works are unlikely to find a wide readership.

Yet Hobsbawm's theses about capitalism and culture, however impressionistically sketched out, remain worthy of attention. In some ways, interestingly, they recall a far more self-consciously theoretical, far more difficult work by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, initially published in 1962 and entitled, in English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas, born just twelve years after Hobsbawm, was then a Marxist of sorts, although an eclectic one. This work tells the story of how the commercial capitalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the premium that merchants placed on timely and accurate news, spurred the development of new forms of public communication. Newspapers were born, and, along with them, new spaces to discuss the news, such as coffee houses, literary salons and lending libraries. New forms of public discussion followed, in which contributors participated as equals and placed few if any topics outside the reach of rational critique. From such forms of discussion and such spaces—the "bourgeois public sphere"—arose a spirit of critique and contestation that eventually expressed itself in revolutionary action. The vision of the public sphere as rational and free was always, Habermas recognized, more an ideal than a reality. Only educated men of a certain social class could actually participate, and a spirit of rational exchange did not always predominate. But however imperfect, it did exist—for a time. It could not, however, survive the further development of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As voracious new business interests came to dominate newspaper publishing, and to dictate the content of publications, the older forms of free discussion were corrupted beyond recognition. Habermas's book, while much debated, remains an intriguing, powerful and much-read account of the birth of the modern age.

Habermas's story has quite a bit in common with Hobsbawm's, despite their differences in emphasis, chronology and style. Each of these two Marxisant thinkers hoped to trace the way capitalist development, at one stage of history, helped to generate certain identifiably bourgeois ideals. Both then saw these ideals undermined by the further progress of capitalism. But both showed a surprising appreciation for the initial ideals—the "public sphere" for one, and the reverence for a tolerant, high-minded high culture for the other. In fact, both scholars took these ideals seriously enough to use them as yardsticks against which to measure the flaws of the modern age.

Somewhat ironically, given Hobsbawm's vocal Communist politics, it is this side of his work, rather than his Marxism, that now does the most to keep it readable and relevant. The political tyrannies to which he professed loyalty have collapsed so completely that even the ideals they proclaimed can no longer function seriously as yardsticks against which to measure anything. The hope of a world revolution springing from the source of the October Revolution has joined its original exponent, Leon Trotsky, in the place he himself named the "ash heap of history." But the impulse that drove the doomed Jews of Central Europe to define their new, emancipated status by their veneration for high-minded, beautiful poetry and painting, novels and plays, symphonies and operas—surely that is something for which we should all continue to feel more than a little nostalgia.

 

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University.

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Underline, transcribe, highlight: David Foster Wallace put his anxieties – writer’s block, self-loathing, mental breakdowns – in his marginalia...

aldaily:Underline, transcribe, highlight: David Foster Wallace put his anxieties – writer's block, self-loathing, mental breakdowns – in his marginalia...

Reading Wallace Reading
With a fellowship to study his personal library, I wanted to get as far into David Foster Wallace's head as possible. But what I found there was more than I'd bargained for.
I have David Foster Wallace's personal copy of Don DeLillo's novel End Zone. It is in my hands. It used to be his, and now it's mine, albeit temporarily and under careful supervision by credentialed professionals. It is teeth-chatteringly cold in this room and brain-fryingly hot on the street because it's July in Austin. People are baking cookies on their dashboards, and they're delicious. It will not rain until September.

I am relaying this information to you from the Reading Room of The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which in addition to housing the most powerful air conditioner in North America, houses pretty much every literary archive that you could dream of having access to, including the David Foster Wallace Archive, which, along with Wallace's manuscripts and correspondence, has about 300 books from his personal library, 250 of which contain copious annotations in Wallace's miniscule handwriting. I am actually being paid, or, more accurately, subsidized, to read his annotations.

There's documentation for this. The Andrew Mellon Foundation granted me a fellowship (and a private office) for a proposal entitled "Reading Wallace Reading: David Foster Wallace's Glosses and the Aesthetic Benefits of Close Reading." While this may threaten to sound impressive, both the proposal's title and its contents are in reality complete and utter bullshit. There is nothing academic about my reasons for being here; I am in Austin always and only as a fan. Mere fandom, however, is not enough to convince your wife to allow you to leave her and your two toddlers behind in the mild climes of Los Angeles so that you can jaunt to the burning pit of Hell that is Austin during the drought of 2011 just to pore over the marginalia of a major American writer you're obsessed with. Phrasing it like that makes you sound irresponsible and selfish, but when you call yourself a Ransom Center Fellow and you flash some Mellon Foundation coin, you've got academic immunity and are more or less free from all other obligations.

If all this sounds a bit strange, let me try to contextualize this: apart from one of his sweat-soaked bandanas or used chewing tobacco, David Foster Wallace's annotations are probably about as sacred to his fans as a piece of the True Cross is to Christians. No Wallace fan could resist an opportunity, especially a subsidized opportunity, to touch the literary equivalent of a medieval holy relic.

If that analogy makes it sound like I consider myself a pilgrim, let me bring things back down to earth because the truth is far less lofty and noble: I am not a pilgrim, and my trip to Austin is no religious pilgrimage. I came to Austin as a stalker, the kind of person who ought to be the recipient of a restraining order, not a research fellowship. The fellowship faintly disguises the fact that I am here to invade David Foster Wallace's privacy, and that I took advantage of the Mellon Foundation to satisfy my personal compulsion to get as close to the inside of Wallace's literary head as I could possibly get. What I failed to anticipate during all my academic grifting was how much peering into the dark recesses of Wallace's skull would give me the howling fantods. What I wanted, I learned, was much more than I bargained for.

This realization came fast and hard the moment I opened DFW's copy of End Zone. I knew the DeLillo books would be juicy because DeLillo was pretty much Wallace's favorite author, but that was no preparation for the words that greeted me when I carefully opened the book's brittle paperback cover:

"SILENCE = HORROR."

My breath tripped in my throat. I was hoping for revealing annotations, and Wallace exceeded my expectations with his first gloss. Freaky things like "SILENCE = HORROR" are not the first thing a researcher stumbles across anywhere outside of a TV show. Wallace may have been talking about End Zone, but the context was totally different now; these were words from beyond the grave, written in a dead man's hand, and even though I'd never met him, here I was holding his treasured book, staring his mind in the face, and his first utterance to me is "SILENCE = HORROR." Wallace, the self-described "math weenie," had written the perfect equation, one that has come to represent his silence, the horror of his death, and, as I realized later, my silence, my horror. Equations, after all, work both ways.

And this was only the beginning.

Three books after End Zone, I opened a book whose annotations chilled me deeper than the HRC Reading Room's cooling system could ever aspire to. This was the moment when I confronted the letters that have preoccupied me for the past three years and filled me with more creative fear and personal dread than I've ever felt before.

The letters appeared beside the following passage on page 87 of DeLillo's Great Jones Street:

"There's nothing out there but a dull sort of horror. You can't just churn it up into your own fresh mixture. Hero, rogue and symbol that you are."

"Maybe I don't want to churn it up at all. Maybe I want to make it even duller and more horrible. I don't know. One thing's sure. I can't go out there and sing pretty lyrics or striking lyrics and I can't go out there and make new and louder and more controversial sounds. I've done all that. More of that would be just what it says — more of the same. Maybe what I want is less. To become the least of what I was."

Wallace underlined that entire passage. Then he drew a line down the margin. Then he wrote these three letters: "DFW." And then he underlined them. Twice.

It's that "DFW" in the margin that haunts me.

I only thought I knew what "DFW" meant before. It was fanboy shorthand for the literary icon and hero that is David Foster Wallace, but to Wallace, "DFW" stood for the literary entity known as David Foster Wallace, his writerly persona that existed only on the page, apart from the living-and-breathing Dave Wallace. Wallace satirizes his literary moniker-cum-identity in The Pale King, where he writes "once you're fixed with a certain nom de plume, you're more or less stuck with it, no matter how alien or pretentious it sounds to you in your everyday life" (297), but this discomfort with his full name existed long before The Pale King. In a postcard to Don DeLillo, Wallace explains that

" 'Foster' is my middle name, foisted on me as part of my N.d.P. by my agent in 1985 — he said there was 'already a David Wallace.' I was 23 and would have called myself Seymour Butts if he'd told me to. … Seeing my full name used in print makes me feel like Lee [Harvey] O[swald] did in Libra — another reason that book is probably my favorite of yours …"

In this postcard, Wallace connects the inclusion of his middle name to his hunger for success and approval—the name represents a business decision, a means of standing out in the book market, a decision that was not his and that he has come to feel trapped by years later. It is an identity that he cannot escape — it's been "foisted upon" him — especially on the page. And what does this have to do with Lee Harvey Oswald? It seems like an extreme comparison, but look at page 416 of DeLillo's Libra:

"It sounded extremely strange. He didn't recognize himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was everywhere. He heard it coming from the walls. … It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else."

But when Wallace came across a passage in someone else's fiction that he identified with, he wrote his initials in the margin. Most of the time, he elected to use "DFW" rather than "DW," implying that he was relating these passages to the literary persona that he felt both shackled to and alienated from.

I'm sure most of us identify with or are touched by passages in the things that we read. That is, after all, one of the reasons that we read. Some of us — diehards perhaps — may even underline them or copy them into a notebook or commit parts of them to memory. But I have never heard of anyone writing his/her initials in the margin of a book. And I've certainly never heard of someone doing all of the above and then some. This is obsession, capital-I Identification, the kind that seems excessive and bizarre because that's exactly what it is.

After finding my first "DFW," I wasn't interested in finding anything else in his books. As a Ransom Center staffer delivered each new stack of books to me, the only question I found myself asking was "will this one have a DFW in it?" I never questioned whether seeing a "DFW" might not be a good thing to see, that the presence of one on the page might mark a painful, private moment in Wallace's life, one that I had no business seeing, let alone being eager to encounter.

Wallace's initials appear twenty-one times in seventeen books, books ranging from novels to memoirs to literary anthologies to writing guides to philosophy and self-help books, and nearly every "DFW" or "DW" in Wallace's archive appears next to a passage about creating, or, more precisely, the failure to create. And the "DFW"s that don't appear alongside gut-wrenching descriptions of arrested creativity accompany withering descriptions of imbalanced, acutely self-conscious mental states, which only adds to the overall impression one gets of Wallace's mental image of himself as a solipsistic failure, a gifted person who has lost control of his gift and now lives as a prisoner to "DFW" and all of its demands, demands he fears he will never be able to fulfill.

"DFW" represented a classic Wallaceian double-bind to Wallace: it encapsulated his talent and his limitations, the force that blessed him with creative stardom and cursed him with aesthetic failure. His talent, the very thing that held the world in awe of him, was what Wallace viewed as his greatest antagonist, the elusive force that continually threatened to abandon him, leaving him mediocre, forgotten, silent, left with only the horror of failed genius.

Joseph Frank's book Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation captures this double-bind rather well. Even though Wallace was reading Frank's bio as an assignment for The New York Times Book Review (during his time aboard the cruise ship he would later christen the Nadir, no less), he still wrote "DFW" next to this passage on page 334 discussing Notes from Underground:

"The underground man's vanity convinces him of his own superiority and he despises everyone; but since he desires such superiority to be recognized by others, he hates the world for its indifference and falls into self-loathing at his own humiliating dependence."

Wallace also underlined a related sentiment on page 117 of DeLillo's novel Ratner's Star: "The work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was … his identity …"

And then there's this one from page 55 of Apostolos K. Doxiades' novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: "How terrible it must have been for him, if after such a brilliant beginning he suddenly began to feel his great gift, his only strength in life, his only joy, deserting him." In the margin, Wallace wrote "DW; Self-pity; Faint ☹."

In his copy of R. D. Laing's book The Divided Self, Wallace drew a parallel between himself and one of Laing's case studies. For one individual, Laing wrote, "the loss of an argument would jeopardize his existence," and Wallace wrote that this would be "Like DFW's loss of ability to write fiction." When Wallace sat down to write, this is what lay on the line for him. He had to be "DFW" or he was no one at all.

To give you an idea of how concerned Wallace was about being unable to live up to the image of "DFW," one of his books in the HRC library is On Writer's Block. That's not a typo: David Foster Wallace, author of the 600,000-word maximalist opus Infinite Jest, owned a book about overcoming writer's block. Several of his letters to Don DeLillo express his envy of writers like William T. Vollmann and Joyce Carol Oates, who had the ability to crank out a new novel what seemed like every six months while Wallace struggled to produce a novel each decade. These letters even pepper DeLillo with amateurish questions such as "Do you have like a daily writing routine?" And this was after he'd published Infinite Jest!

Wallace relays his struggle to produce work in a consistent and disciplined manner in a letter to DeLillo: "… it's frustrating to feel that I'm getting mature and more disciplined in some areas of adult life and yet still seem a slave to my moods and emotions when it comes to work." Later in the same letter, Wallace even relates the shame of how private and isolating this struggle actually is when he describes the "sad manically charming and loquacious letters" he receives "from young writers who struggle" with writer's block "and tell me that they regard me as some paragon of steady drive and discipline, which letters I try to answer politely but they make me feel fucked-up and Unknown." This feeling is perhaps best expressed in something he wrote in the margins of On Writer's Block: "style-self perjury nicotine trip double bind re: IJ [Infinite Jest] — want both to guarantee similar reaction and to avoid being repetitive, derivative of self."

Wallace's challenges with maintaining discipline as a writer caused him to experience a sense of alienation from his own prodigious talent, as these two passages in Walter Kaufmann's introduction to Richard Schacht's Alienation amply show:

"The student who chooses to become a scientist or writer, painter or philosopher, is apt to feel that the competition has become so deep that it defies comparison with previous ages. … he has no assurance that he will be able to make a living in his chosen field, and there is much less reason to expect that he will ever make his mark by doing something really worthwhile. And this is one of the most crucial experiences associated with alienation."

…

"… the creative life is full of depressions, and very few have talent enough to find an overall sense of satisfaction in it …"

These two passages appear on the same page. Wallace underlined them both. He also wrote "DW" beside each of them. Two on the same page.

Reading these annotations in the frigid HRC Reading Room filled me with the same disbelief you probably feel now. Wallace's creative angst affected his entire view of himself and his grip on reality. For instance, look at this passage from page 211 of DeLillo's Libra:

"… the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world."

Wallace underlined this and wrote "DFW" beside it.

Page after page, book after book, the annotations in Wallace's library fixate upon Wallace's deepest creative fears, fears that begin with his identity as a writer but end up questioning his existence as a human.

In "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," Wallace claimed that he generally found sports biographies "breathtakingly insipid" pieces of writing, but that does not appear to prevent him from finding himself revealed on page 139 of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Samuel Wilson Fussell:

"I who could remember every test score I'd ever received back to the second grade, yet couldn't remember half of my teacher's names. I who had cynically selected every academic institution I'd attended not for its offerings but for its reputation. I'd been far less interested in an education than in documented proof of scholarly success. Even Bamm Bamm's search for war wasn't too different from my own entry into the gym. As long as we created for ourselves a rite of passage, we could instill our lives with meaning."

He drew a line down the margin and wrote "DW" beside it. Not "DFW," the writer, but "DW," the person. He wrote the same initials beside this passage from Robert Stone's Dog Soliders, page 42:

"Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am."

But the most devastating passage of all, the one that over time has caused me to reconsider the purpose and worth of this whole project, comes from page 307 of DeLillo's Americana:

"There is no book, Davy. There's eleven pages and seven of them don't have any words on them. And I'm not making any great claims about the other four."

"I thought you were writing all the time you were up in Maine. How long were you up there?"

"Almost a year," he said.

"What did you do all that time?"

"I don't know. I really don't remember much of it. I guess I was stoned most of the time. I think I blew a fuse or something. My head went dead. That's the only way to put it. Something in there burned out and blew away. Went dead.

"And you were in that garage for a whole year. And you weren't doing anything?"

"I was doing something. I was killing my head."

He underlined this passage and wrote "DFW" next to it.

It does not take many interpretive leaps for one to see the parallels between this passage and events in Wallace's life: substance abuse, writer's block, self-loathing, mental breakdowns, right down to the garage-turned-living room. Although the writer in this passage is not the one named David, the passage in this context takes on the quality of Wallace having a conversation with himself. This, it seems to me, is as close a view of Wallace's mind as you can get. This stuff is as private as private gets. The impulse we feel to avert our eyes in no accident.

I think this passage helps me to see why I balked earlier at the idea of calling my quest in Austin a pilgrimage. These annotations are not holy relics because they restore nothing. Rather, they are simply the fears and obsessions of a damaged soul laid naked on the page, pushed to the margins but hardly marginal. A close encounter does not provide more salvation.

No one ever talks about how identifying with something you read might not always be a good thing. Saying "that's like me" is not always an affirmation — it can be terrifying and make you feel "more fucked-up and Unknown." Critics and fans alike rhapsodize about identifying with David Foster Wallace's writing as though it can only be consoling and empowering, and I used to think so too, until I got too close and discovered what may be the most important truth about literature, the true "aesthetic benefit of close reading," though I doubt the Mellon Foundation would be all that interested in hearing about my discovery, as it is beneficial only in the most cautionary of senses: there is such a thing as reading too closely.

Wallace's annotations suggest that he had been reading too closely, searching for too much validation, guidance, or comfort in the books he read, to the point that his reading only wound up reinforcing his worst tendencies. Wallace found no escape from himself while he was reading; rather, his personal library remained just that: personal, continually bringing him back to his own struggles and inadequacies.

And I found myself in danger of following him. Yes, this begins and ends as being about me, the guy in the frosty reading room in Austin, for fandom is always about the fan; the self is always the subject. The artist is, at best, the mask fans wear to distract themselves from the fact that they are looking into a mirror. I learned far more about myself through reading Wallace reading than I learned about David Foster Wallace. I discovered I had been reading Wallace too closely. For years I looked to Wallace for answers to just about everything — how to think, how to live, what to read and how. Turns out, I got what I wanted, if what I wanted was a more erudite way to criticize myself or a higher, more crippling level of self-consciousness than I already had. I did wind up understanding myself better, if only to understand where I might be headed and what I must avoid becoming.

This is why I've taken over two years to finish writing this, why I've stalled out time and time again in search of the right voice or style or insight into something that feels both too large for me to take on and too close for me to see clearly. This "DFW" persona, this mental state of Wallace's, was a reflection of mine as well, albeit distorted and exaggerated through a funhouse mirror darkly. Wallace's work reads like a more articulate, insightful version of the ticker-tape running in our own skulls — this is the cliché that everyone employs to describe Wallace's writing, and for me it is absolutely true. However, no one really interrogates what that statement means or how far something like that goes. If I keep reading Wallace this closely, will I end up resembling him even more closely? Do the devices I borrow from him here — self-aware reportage, direct interrogation, hyperbolic jokes about mundane locations — show that I have moved beyond him or simply fallen further under his influence? If I continue on this path of emulation, will I reach the same conclusions about being alive as he did?

In his work In Quest of the Ordinary, Stanley Cavell writes "to acknowledge that I am known by what this text knows does not amount to agreeing with it … To be known by it is to find thinking in it that confronts you." Wallace wrote "DW" next to this. I must agree, and the confrontation I had with Wallace's thinking is one I fear that I'm not resilient enough to endure in the long term. What I saw went beyond fandom, beyond hero-worship, beyond sympathy — it was simply pure fear and horror. And it has often shocked me into silence.

I know Jonathan Franzen has led the lynch mob in criticizing Wallace's fans for elevating him to the status of "Saint Dave," and although the truth is important and I should be working to overcome sanitized, heroic depictions of complex human beings, I cannot live with the Wallace I saw, the private Wallace, the one Franzen's talking about. I can live with Saint Dave. It's a lie, I know, but a necessary one for me if I can ever hope to continue reading his work. Doing the work of getting to the truth about Wallace gets me too close to truths about myself that I am healthier for not obsessing over, at least if I want to live to see fifty. Not every truth ought to be lived with. Some truths must be overcome.

Among all Wallace's annotations, I found several that I would also have written my own initials next to, if I were so inclined, but doing so would be too revealing, too frightening, like saying the name of someone you're trying to forget.

But there is one I feel comfortable with, though for entirely self-serving reasons. It's from DeLillo's Americana, page 336:

David Foster Wallace underlined this passage. I don't know why he didn't write his initials next to it, but I know that his not doing so has made room for me to add mine. DeLillo's words give voice to my conflicted feelings about DFW, feelings that I cannot bring myself to utter in my own voice, despite the fact that their truth and intensity grow daily. I don't have the guts to speak them; I can only underline, transcribe, highlight; leaving my emotions strewn along the margins. •17 August 2014

My unironic gratitude and admiration go to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center, Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada, CA, Metairie Park Country Day School in Metairie, LA, and Team Miley, all of which provided support and encouragement for this project.

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Mike Miley teaches Literature and Film Studies at Metairie Park Country Day School in Metairie, LA. He is a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans and The American Film Institute. His writing has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Film International, Moving Image Source, Music and the Moving Image, The New Orleans Review, and Scope.

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Images courtesy of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust and The Harry Ransom Center. All materials quoted in the essay are the property of their authors.
Excerpts from Americana, Great Jones Street, and Libra are © Don DeLillo and appear courtesy of Penguin Books. The excerpt from Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is © Apostolos Doxiades, 2001, and appears courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing. The excerpt from Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 is © Joseph Frank, 1988, and appears courtesy of Princeton University Press.
David Foster Wallace's annotations are used by the generous permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

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In an age of constant status updates, what becomes of art forms – like literary memoir – that thrive on concealment?...

aldaily:In an age of constant status updates, what becomes of art forms – like literary memoir – that thrive on concealment?...

Credit Illustration by Sophia Foster-Dimino

In the middle of my writing day, I sometimes take a Facebook break. I know I shouldn't do this. I counsel my writing students not to do this. But writing is a solitary business, and—well, let's face it, Facebook is tempting. It's right there. A lonely writer can be connected with a whole range of humanity without ever leaving her desk chair. A Russian novel's worth of tragedy and comedy is on display. A friend posts, "As I write this, my mother's light is going out." Another friend announces his divorce simply by switching his status from married to single. Still another friend anxiously awaits biopsy results. There are engagements, marriages, anniversaries, illnesses, college graduations, retirements, vacations, and endless photographs of cute dogs. All of these accompanied by responses, some numbering in the hundreds. Condolences and congratulations. Prayers and emoticons of hearts and hands pressed together in namaste. There's something beautiful and absolutely genuine about it—Facebook is, after all, a way of staying connected in an increasingly busy and disconnected world—but it can also feel thin and undigested, a skimming over of data rather than a deep sink into the specificity and emotional reality of human experience. Death? Check. Divorce? Check. A namaste sign instead of a condolence note. A heart rather than a phone call.

I wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age as a writer during these years of living out loud. My parents were in a car crash in 1986 that killed my father and badly injured my mother. If social media had been available to me at the time, would I have posted the news on Facebook? Tweeted it to my followers as I stood on line to board the flight home? Instead of sitting numbly on the plane, with the help of several little bottles of vodka, would I have purchased a few hours of air time with Boingo Wi-Fi and monitored the response—the outpouring of kindness, a deluge of "likes," mostly from strangers? And ten years later, would I have been compelled to write a memoir about that time in my life? Or would I have felt that I'd already told the story by posting it as my status update?

In an essay on Emily Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, "It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry." We live in a time in which little is concealed, and that pressure valve—the one that every writer is intimate with—rarely has a chance to fill and fill to the point of explosion. Literary memoir is born of this explosion. It is born of the powerful need to craft a story out of the chaos of one's own history. One of literary memoir's greatest satisfactions—both for writer and reader—is the slow, deliberate making of a story, of making sense, out of randomness and pain. In the inimitable words of Annie Dillard, "You may not let it rip."

I'm a bit of an accidental memoirist. I've written five novels and three memoirs. I never planned to write memoir at all, and if you had told me, at the beginning of my writing life, that I would write three, I would have laughed. But we don't choose the forms our work takes. We feel the pressure, wait for the explosion, then stand back, stunned and speechless at the shape that emerges. My first memoir centered on my parents' accident and its aftermath. The accident itself wasn't the story. As I often tell my writing students, just because it happened doesn't make it interesting. In the years that I wrote that memoir, "Slow Motion," I dove deep into my Orthodox Jewish upbringing, my parents' contentious marriage, my own powerful rebellion, my lack of any sense of identity or self-worth, and the way that my family's tragedy turned out to be my unlikely salvation. I'm grateful that I wasn't a young writer with a blog or a massive following on social media. The years of silence were deepening ones. My story burrowed its way deeper and deeper into my being until it became a story I could turn inside out, hold to the light like a prism, craft into a story that was bigger than its small, sorry details.

I worry that we're confusing the small, sorry details—the ones that we post and read every day—for the work of memoir itself. I can't tell you how many times people have thanked me for "sharing my story," as if the books I've written are not chiseled and honed out of the hard and unforgiving material of a life but, rather, have been dashed off, as if a status update, a response to the question at the top of every Facebook feed: "What's on your mind?" I haven't shared my story, I want to tell them. I haven't unburdened myself, or softly and earnestly confessed. Quite the opposite. In order to write a memoir, I've sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I've waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I've been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters. There is no immediate gratification in this. No great digital crowd is "liking" what we do. We don't experience the Pavlovian, addictive click and response of posting something that momentarily relieves the pressure inside of us, then being showered with emoticons. The gratification we memoirists do experience is infinitely deeper and more bittersweet. It is the complicated, abiding pleasure, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, of finding the universal thread that connects us to the rest of humanity, and, by doing so, turns our small, personal sorrows and individual tragedies into art.

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CK Scott Moncrieff – poet, soldier, spy, translator of Proust and Stendhal – died at 40 of esophageal cancer. The cause...

aldaily:CK Scott Moncrieff – poet, soldier, spy, translator of Proust and Stendhal – died at 40 of esophageal cancer. The cause...

A bout of trench fever meant that he missed the worst of the Somme, though his luck ran out when his leg was broken in two places by friendly fire in April 1917. Or perhaps it continued to run, given that he was left, on recuperation, with only a limp, a disability just severe enough to preclude his return to the front line and the slaughter still to come. Invalided home, he met Wilfred Owen at Robert Graves's wedding. Scott Moncrieff fell in love with Owen; whether that love was consummated or even reciprocated is more doubtful. From his desk in a new job at the War Office, he tried – and failed – to prevent Owen's return to the front.

After his friend's death, Scott Moncrieff renounced poetry as a vocation, turning instead to translation. It seems that he did not have any particular passion for À la recherche du temps perdu. He suggested a translation to Constable in 1919, it seems, only because they had turned down a collection of his own satirical verse. Proust, he had heard, was popular on both sides of the channel but at this point only two volumes had been published and he had no idea the final text would run to 1.2 million words. Judging from his grumblings about the later volumes, his devotion to the novel became more a labour than a love.

He worked rapidly, scribbling down a passage whenever he had a spare moment, then reading it aloud to a select group of listeners, usually older, richer women, to check the sonority. He was self-deprecating about his own abilities – "My trouble," he wrote, "is that I know comparatively few French words and no grammar," – but beat himself up over his mistakes, even though the early editions of Proust were riddled with typesetting errors. The translation of the fourth volume – which Proust had entitled Sodome et Gomorrhe and Scott Moncrieff more tactfully called Cities of the Plain (he referred to it in correspondence as "Cissies on the Plain") – was particularly tricky, as Chatto & Windus were conscious that the discussion of "inversion" (homosexuality) might lead to the book being banned on grounds of obscenity.

After a gruelling stint as a sub-editor on the foreign desk of The Times, Scott Moncrieff moved to Italy in 1923, where life was cheaper and less strenuous. He supported himself through his translation – not just Proust, but Stendhal, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise and Pirandello, whom he introduced to English-speaking readers – and by a sinecure at the British Passport Office. The latter job was, in fact, cover for some agreeable espionage work against Mussolini's fascist government: he stayed in plush hotels around the country, befriending Italian fighter pilots, observing troop movements from railway platforms and poking around naval shipyards. In September 1929, at the age of only 40, Scott Moncrieff was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer – the result, he claimed, of too much fellatio. He received the last sacraments in the Calvary Hospital in Rome less than six months later.

Jean Findlay's biography has nothing new to say about Scott Moncrieff as a translator and glides lightly over his literary personality. It also displays a rather wearing fidelity to chronology that gives rise to too many summer holidays at the beginning of the book and too many royalty statements towards the end. But there is a tenderness with which she cherishes even the most inconsequential of events. Findley is Scott Moncrieff's great-great-niece and her book is fitting tribute to a man who died before he could get stuck into the last volume of his life's work, to be entitled, with mournful irony, "Time Regained".

Chasing Lost Time: the Life of C K Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator by Jean Findlay

349pp, Chatto & Windus Telegraph offer price: £22.50 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £25) . Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk

READ: Best books of 2014

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This Is What It Was Like To Go to James Joyce's Birthday Party

And have him chat with you about his favorite novels.

By Padraic Colum

This piece was originally published on May 13, 1931. 

It is tea time at the Joyces'. Mrs. Joyce gives us the best tea and the nicest cakes that are to be had in any house in Paris. The children are here, now a young man and a young woman: George, a singer, Lucia, charming and retiring. Mrs. Joyce, with her rich personality, her sincere and steadfast character, is an ideal companion for a man who has to do Joyce's work. She talks about Galway to me, and the old rain-soaked town comes before me as she talks about the square, the churches, the convent in which were passed many of her years. Some close friends, Irish, English, French, American, are here for tea. It is Joyce's birthday—his forty-seventh—the second of February.

This particular day is worth noting in Irish intellectual history. In the first place it is Saint Brighid's Day, the first day of spring, when, according to Irish-speaking people, the sun "takes a cock's step forward." Saint Brighid was the patron of poets. James Stephens' birthday is on the second of February; Thomas MacDonagh's also fell on the same date. The fact that James Stephens and he have the same birthday is of enormous interest to Joyce. I do not know that he has any belief in any system of astrology, but I know that he is very much influenced by correspondences which seem to disclose something significant in man's life. The whole of Ulysses is a vast system of correspondences. "Signatures of all things I am here to read," Stephen Daedalus muses as he walks along the strand, "seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot." The "signatures" are to be read, not only in the still life along the seashore, but in all sorts of occurrences. The fact that he and James Stephens have the same birthday, have the same first name, that they both have two children, a boy and a girl, and that the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who is also a figure in Ulysses is named Stephen, is not only of great interest but of extreme importance in Joyce's mind.

James Joyce, because of the state of his eyes, reads very little nowadays, and so it is a surprise to find that the conversation has turned to literature. He speaks of Henry James, who he thinks has influenced Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He praises Portrait of a Lady, dwelling with much delight on the presentation of Isabel Archer. He says that he has taken up Madame Bovary again recently, but found the narrative part tedious. For Yeats's poetry he has a high regard, and mentions that, in collaboration with an Italian poet, he did a translation into Italian of "The Countess Cathleen" (it will be remembered that it was the lyrics in this play that possessed the mind of young Stephen Daedalus at a sorrowful time of his life). And having spoken of Yeats he goes on to speak of some other Irish writers. George Moore gave him one of his recent books; Joyce was sorry that the book was not Esther Waters, which he likes. I thought that as a Dublin man he would have a share in that city's veneration for Swift. He has nothing of it. "He made a mess of two women's lives," he says. I speak of the intensity that is in passages of Swift's writing. "There is more intensity," Joyce says, "in a single stanza of Mangan's than in all Swift's writing." Then I remember that the earliest prose of Joyce's which I read was an essay on Mangan; it had appeared in the college magazine while Joyce was a student. I am delighted to hear this European master praise a poet who is so little known outside Ireland. He does not think that the patriotic anthem "Dark Rosaleen" is Mangan at his best. He praises "Kathleen-ni-Holohan," "The Lament for Sir Maurice Fitzgerald," "Siberia," and two less known poems which are described as translations—the epigram that begins "Veil not thy mirror, sweet Amine," and a poem of exile that has for a beginning "Morn and eve a star invites me. One imploring silver star." He praises Goldsmith, too, especially the Goldsmith of "Retaliation," quoting with great delight the lines upon Burke:

whose genius was such

We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much;

Who born for the universe, narrowed his mind.

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat

To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.

He praises Goldsmith for his human qualities. "He was unassuming," he says. For Joyce thinks it is a virtue in a man to make no disturbance about what he does or the life he has to live. "What is so courteous and so patient as a great faith?" he asks in his youthful essay on Mangan, and perhaps it is because they are indications of this great faith that he praises modesty and courtesy in certain men.

In the evening I see James Joyce again: it is at a dinner which is a birthday celebration. His appearance, his manner, his hospitality, have a quality which is courtly. I am reminded of an old-fashioned grace that was in a few Dublin houses of the old days where gentlemanliness was evident in appearance and discourse. James Joyce's family is here and some close friends of the family. Miss Sylvia Beach, the American woman who published Ulysses, and Sullivan, the Franco-Irish tenor who is singing at the Paris Opera. The waiter brings a special wine which Joyce recommends to us very earnestly though he does not drink it himself as it is red. It is Clos Saint Patrice, 1920, and it is from the part of France where Saint Patrick sojourned after he had made escape from his Irish captivity. Joyce will not have it that Patrick was from the Island of Britain—he was a Gaul. He notes how the Tannhauser legend in its earliest form is attached to Saint Patrick. When he crossed the river and planted his staff, the staff flowered, and where it flowered are the vineyards of today. "He is the only saint whom a man can get drunk in honor of," Joyce says, praising Patrick in this way. We laugh, but he insists that this is high praise. He vaunts Patrick above all the other saints in the calendar. Some of us mention St. Francis, but Joyce is no Franciscan, and he dismisses the Poor Man. We think that he may have more sympathy with the intellectual saints, the great Doctors of the Church; he declares he takes little interest in Augustine. Aquinas, then, whose esthetic Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man accepts? But Joyce does not seem to have the veneration for Aquinas that he once had. I think he may put Ignatius Loyola high on account of the noble praise he has given to the Jesuit order in Portrait of the Artist. But he does not praise Loyola—the only saint he will praise is Saint Patrick, and we are convinced by his argument as we drink the Clos Saint Patrice. And then we hear Joyce saying very earnestly, "he was modest and he was sincere," and this is praise indeed from Joyce, and he adds, alluding to Patrick's confession, "He waited too long to write his Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man."

This evening I have an instance of his genuine dismay at any suggestion that people whom he knows may be involved in anything violent. I had mentioned that after the kidnapping of a Russian general, the house I was living in had been watched by the police, for many Russians had apartments in it. I even had gone on to say that I thought the attic I had rented to do some work in was being searched for papers. Joyce was disturbed. Now he asks me about the affair, and I tell him that nothing is happening—there is no search going on now. Joyce is actually relieved to hear this. He has led the most heroic life of any writer living today; what he has accomplished could only have been done through the confrontation every day of obstacles which would have made another despair or turn back. And so when he speaks of his aversion to aggressiveness, turbulence, violence of any kind, his words are impressive. "Birth and death are sufficiently violent for me," he says. The state for which he has the highest esteem was the old Hapsburg Empire. "They called it a ramshackle empire," he says, "I wish there were more such ramshackle empires in the world." What he liked about old Austria was not only the mellowness of life there, but the fact that the state tried to impose so little upon its own or upon other people. It was not warlike, it was not efficient, and its bureaucracy was not strict; it was the country for a peaceful man. Crime does not fascinate James Joyce as it fascinates the rest of us—the suggestion of crime dismays him. He tells me that one of his handicaps in writing Work in Progress is that he has no interest in crime of any kind, and he feels that this book which deals with the night-life of humanity should have reference to that which is associated with the night-life of cities—crime. But he cannot get criminal action into the work. With his dislike of violence goes another dislike—the dislike of any sentimental relation. Violence in the physical life, sentimentality in the emotional life, are to him equally distressing. The sentimental part of Swift's life repels him as much as the violence of some of his writing. 

For Sullivan he shows the most brotherly regard. It seems to me that he sees in this tenor the singer he might have been. They are men of the same age, each has won European recognition in the country where recognition in their particular art is hardest to obtain and most worthwhile—Joyce in France with his writing, Sullivan in Italy with his singing. Joyce might have had his appearance in opera or on the concert platform. When he was a student in the university and sang at one of the Feis Ceoil competitions, he was awarded a silver medal; the director of the Academy of Music sent for him and offered him free training. Later on when he was in Trieste and had the manuscripts of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man coming back to him, he had the temptation to forsake literature and make his career that of a singer. What wasted life these ten years in Trieste were, teaching languages, receiving no encouragement as a writer, no acknowledgment! I know by the way he speaks about those days that the temptation to turn to another career must have been a bitter one.

In Paris he goes to the Opera; he goes every night on which Sullivan has a leading role. He thinks Sullivan is phenomenal in William Tell. "There are eight hundred top notes in it, including seventy of the highest register between B flat and C sharp." It is characteristic of Joyce that he should have made this estimate. He ranks Rossini with the very great composers and puts William Tell with the greatest of the operas. He discerns in it the theme which he himself has worked out in Ulysses—the father's search for the son, the son's search for the father. Ostensibly the opera is about the relation of men to their fatherland; into it comes the old patriot's relation to his son Arnold, and Arnold's love for Mathilde, whose father is the oppressor of the fatherland, and the fugitive who is pursued by the imperial forces because he has protected his daughter from their molestation. All this Joyce makes clear to us as we sit with him at this pleasant celebration.

We drink more of the Clos Saint Patrice. What of Joyce's relation to the country to which Patrick returned after his sojourn in France? He does not speak of it. And yet he says that he should like to live in a city that was not one of the great cities of the earth—one that has a population of about 300,000. "I go to forge a new conscience for my race," Stephen Daedalus said as he left the city that has about that population. We have no speeches on this birthday: no one tells James Joyce (although a few of his fellow countrymen are present) that the creator of Stephen Daedalus has not failed in the labor of creating that new conscience. We know that he has not failed although we keep silence about it. 

In the apartment to which we return there is jollity. George Joyce sings; Sullivan sings; James Joyce sings. He is persuaded to sing a humorous Irish ballad, "Mollie Branagan," and he renders it with gusto; the phrasing, the intonation, are as an old ballad singer would have them. And then he sings a tragic and sorrowful country song which I have never come across in any collection nor heard from any one else except James Joyce. It is about a man who has given his life to a stranger—he may be from Fairyland, he may be Death himself. It has for burthen "O love of my heart" and "O the brown and the yellow ale," and these refrains in Joyce's voice have more loss in them than ever I heard expressed. He had said to me when we were at the Opera together, "A voice is like a woman—you respond or you do not; its appeal is direct," and he said this to show that what was sung transcended in appeal everything that was written. His own voice in the humorous and the sorrowful song was unforgettable.

And now we sit at the table, two of us, and drink out of the great flagon of white wine that is there, and talk about Dublin days and scenes and people. All memories are sorrowful, and Joyce, who remembers more than any other man, has much to be sorrowful about. He faces suffering in operations on his eyes—ten already. But his thought is never personal; he thinks of friends, he plans how to serve them. Some words are said about writing. "What goes on in an ordinary house like this house in an ordinary day or night—that is what should be written about," he says. "Getting up, dressing, saying ordinary words, doing ordinary business, eating, sleeping, all that we take for granted, not leaving out the digestive processes." For writers who are prophetic Joyce has little regard. "It would be a great impertinence for me to think that I could tell the world what to believe or how to behave." I think of a passage in this early essay of his on Mangan, a passage that is significant because Joyce's mind has not changed in the time between youth and prime. "It must be asked concerning every artist how he is in relation to the highest knowledge and to those laws which do not take holiday because men and times forget them. This is not to look for a message but to approach the temper which has made the work, an old woman praying, or a young man fastening his shoe, and to see what is there well done and how much it signifies." He thinks that too much fuss has been made about the work of recent Irish writers. "If we lift up the back-skirts of English literature we will find there everything we have been trying to do." Every shade of meaning that any writer might want to find can be found in the English language, he says. I feel that only a man who is sustained by some great faith can speak as simply as he speaks. "In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom." So he wrote in this youthful essay which I have quoted from before, and perhaps these words hold his faith.

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Against Editors

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Hamilton Nolan

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Hamilton Nolan

Filed to: how things work

• writing
• journalismism
• media
• editors
• authors
• the workplace

Yesterday 1:00pm

In the writing world, there is a hierarchy. The writers are on the bottom. Above them are editors, who tell the writers what to change. This is backwards. How many good writers has Big Edit destroyed?

"Pish posh," you might say. "You're one to talk. Your grammar is wronged, your metaphors are blunt bricks, and your similes are like a hot needle to the eyeball. Your infinitives are split, your participles are dangling, your spelling is eroneous, your cliches are old as time, your sentences are repetitive, and your sentences are repetitive. Your concepts appear to have been plucked from thin air with no foresight, hindsight, or insight. If anyone is in need of a good editor it is you. And you are ugly."

Yes. I'll grant you that. That is beside the point.

Here is the traditional career track for someone employed in journalism: first, you are a writer. If you hang on, and don't wash out, and manage not to get laid off, and don't alienate too many people, at some point you will be promoted to an editor position. It is really a two-step career journey, in the writing world. Writing, then editing. You don't have to accept a promotion to an editing position of course. You don't have to send your kids to college and pay a mortgage, necessarily. If you want to get regular promotions and raises, you will, for the most part, accept the fact that your path takes you away from writing and into editing, in some form. The number of pure writing positions that offer salaries as high as top editing positions is vanishingly small. Most well-paid writers are celebrities in the writing world. That is how few of them there are.

Here is the problem with this career path: writing and editing are two completely different skills. There are good writers who are terrible editors. (Indeed, some of the worst editors are good writers!) There are good editors who lack the creativity and antisocial personality disorders that would make them great writers. This is okay. This is natural. It is thoroughly unremarkable for an industry to have different positions that require different skill sets. The problem in the writing world is that, in order to move up, the writer must stop doing what he did well in the first place and transition into an editing job that he may or may not have any aptitude for. It is impossible to count how many great writers have made the dutiful step up the career ladder to become an editor and forsaken years of great stories that could have been written had they remained writers. Journalism's two-step career path is a tragedy, because it robs the world of many talented writers, who spend the latter half of their careers in the conceptual muddle of various editing positions.

It is also a farce. The grand traditional print media system—still seen today in top-tier magazines and newspapers—in which each writer's story is monkeyed with by a succession of ever more senior editors is, on the whole, a waste of time and resources. If you believe that having four editors edit a story produces a better story than having one editor edit a story, I submit that you have the small mind of a middle manager, and should be employed not in journalism but in something more appropriate for your numbers-based outlook on life, like carpet sales. Writing is not a field in which quantity produces quality. Writing is more often an endeavor in which the passion and vision of one person produces a piece of work that must then be defended against an onslaught of competing visions of a series of editors who did not actually write or report the story—but who have some great ideas on how it should be changed.

Go find a story published a few years ago in The New Yorker, perhaps America's most tightly edited magazine. Give that story to an editor, and tell him it's a draft. I guarantee you that that editor will take that story—well-polished diamond that it presumably is—and suggest a host of changes. Rewrite the story to the specifications of the new editor. Then take it to another editor, and repeat the process. You will find, once again, that the new editor has changes in mind. If you were a masochist, you could continue this process indefinitely. You would never find an editor who read the story, set down his pencil, and said, "Looks fine. This story is perfect." This is because editing is an art, not a science. To imagine that more editors will produce a better story is akin to imagining that a song by your favorite band would be better if, after the band finished it, it was remixed by a succession of ten producers, one after the other. Would it be different? Yes. Would it be better? I doubt it. The only thing you can be sure of is that it would not be the song that the actual musicians wanted it to be.

When any industry fills itself with middle managers, those middle managers will quite naturally work to justify their own existence. The less their own existence is inherently necessary, the harder they will work to appear to be necessary. An editor who looks over a story and declares it to be fine is not demonstrating his own necessity. He is therefore placing himself in danger of being seen as unnecessary. Editors, therefore, tend to edit. Whether it is necessary or not.

This is not to say that editing is not a legitimate job. It is. It is also a necessary step in the writing process. But it is not the most important role in the writing process. That would be writing, which any honest editor will tell you is much harder than editing. (An editor who will not admit this is not worth listening to.) Reporting is a difficult chore. Writing is a psychologically agonizing struggle. Editing is not easy, but not as onerous as either of the two tasks that precede it. You would never know that, though, by looking at the relative salaries of the people who do the work.

Good editors are valuable. They are also rare. If we simply kept the good ones and dismissed the bad ones, the ranks of editors would immediately shrink to saner levels. Editors are an important part of writing—a subordinate part. Their role in the industry should be equally subordinate. It is absurd that most writers must choose between a career spent writing and a career that offers raises and promotions. The "new" online media, happily, tends to be less editor-heavy than the big legacy media outlets that have sprouted entire ecosystems of editors and sub-editors over the course of decades. This is partly because the stark economics of online journalism make clear just how wasteful all those extra editors are. To hire a new editor instead of a new writer is to give up actual stories in favor of... some marginal improvements, somewhere, or perhaps nothing at all.

When all of the people in the writing world are dead and gone, the only thing that we will leave behind are our stories. Stories are, ultimately, what matter. Stories are what websites and magazines and media "brands" live and die on. Stories come from writers. Writers come first. They shouldn't be second-class citizens in their own industry.

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蛮子的舌头

蛮子的舌头

茨仁唯色 2014年08月18日

Yehteh

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1981年初秋，在藏区东部日益汉化的小城康定（藏语叫达 折多）初中毕业的我，恰遇成都的西南民族学院预科部（相当于高中部）招收藏族学生。这个预科部应该是始于1985年，出于加快同化的目的，在北京、上海等 诸多中国城市创建的西藏班、西藏中学的前身，具有实验性质。当然，官方的说法一概是"帮助西藏培养人才"。

并非父母鼓励，纯属个人意愿，我报考了预科。我和其他几个藏族学生成了北京大规模教育试验的首批小白鼠。正处在叛逆期的我不想被父母管束，且觉得成都是个充满新鲜事物的大城市。

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穿军装的父亲把我送至成都。我们坐在座椅硬梆梆的长途汽车上，翻过了高高的二郎山，这之后，窗外的风景是青青翠竹、大片菜地和挂满枝头的水果。

一下车，就闻到路边饭馆传来的诱人香气。我看到一堆剥了皮的兔头，一时发愣，立刻想到的是吃兔肉会变成豁嘴的西藏民间传说，眼前也出现了那穿过高山纵谷的道路上，藏语发音是"ribung"的兔子倏忽而逝。

扑面而来的很多都是迥异的。饮食；外表；口音……开始吃红烧鳝鱼、吃麻辣兔头、吃青蛙肉。知道吃这些违背了禁忌，更知道不吃这些就是迷信的"蛮子"。成都人似乎爱说"蛮子"，如果你连兔头都不敢吃，必然就是瓜兮兮的"蛮子"（瓜兮兮的意思是笨蛋）。

成都是个潮湿的盆地，我和同族的同学们都惊讶地发现头发卷曲得太厉害了。一般人将这种"自来卷"看成是少数民族的特征。于是我们每天早上都用梳子狠狠地梳着长而卷的头发，要把卷发梳成直发，最终剪成齐耳长的短发，虽然还卷，但看似烫过，就像成都街上的中年妇女。

设在民族学院的预科是一个封闭的"小学校"，我们被安置在 校园一角的两间大教室里上课。我们从不和成都的中学生接触，根本不知道同龄的他们每天在学什么，但应该是一样的，毕竟我们和他们的课本完全相同。我的同学 多数是藏人，其余是彝族，但会说藏语和彝语的没几个，随着时间推移，人人都是一口流利的成都话。

等到大了一些，我们才意识到，随着同化的过程，我们已经把我们自身的一部分遗忘了。拉萨的亲戚们形容我的舌头是"做过了手术的舌头"，因为那些颤音、卷舌音、齿龈音等若干种传统藏音，我不是发不出口就是发成了怪音，甚至连藏语的"拉萨"这个词都发音不准。

上大学的经验更是被置换的经验。整个西南民族学院有三十多 个各具名号的少数民族，让我们似乎生活在多民族的环境里，却并不了解这些民族的历史和文化，我滔滔不绝秦始皇修长城却说不出布达拉宫如何筑成；我倒背如流 唐诗宋词却读不懂六世达赖喇嘛的诗歌；我熟知红色中国若干个革命烈士，却不了解1959年拉萨起义中藏人自己的英雄。

好在我没有忘记拉萨。那是我的出生之地，四岁时随父母迁徙至藏区东部，从此深怀对拉萨的乡愁。直到1990年春天，我大学毕业的第二年才终于返回，在官方主办的西藏文学杂志社任编辑。

但抵达拉萨的最初见闻让我惊讶。童年的记忆并不清晰，而我 只能从我父亲当年拍摄的照片里留下对拉萨的模糊印象，似乎有一种别具一格的美好。现实却是荷枪实弹的军人布满全城，一辆辆装甲车隆隆碾过大街，这是因为一 年前即1989年3月，许多藏人包括僧人、尼姑和平民走上街头，抗议1959年中国政府对藏人反抗的镇压，而这一次，北京对拉萨实行了长达一年零七个月的 军事戒严。

我也完全变成了另一个人。我怀疑，因为我吃过麻辣兔头，冒犯了禁忌的人很可能连外貌也会改变。我的母语原本并非中文，只不过我的问题在于，我的母语在成长过程中被置换了。

双脚站在拉萨的地面上，我有一种深深的孤独感，毋庸置疑，这是做过手术的舌头造成的。我发现，我几乎说不出几句完整而标准的藏语，我脱口而出的反而是带有四川口音的普通话。

而我对自我的追寻、抗拒、接纳……最终以今日的立场讲述西藏的故事，实在是花费了太长、太长的时间。我写我的故乡文化，也在这种写作中找到了自己的声音——用来实现文学与政治的表达。而我也始终意识到，这些我为了我的民族而写作的文章，到底还是用汉语写成的。

茨仁唯色(Tsering Woeser)，藏族诗人、记者及博客作者，她是《听说西藏：散文及实地报道文选》作者之一。本文由Violet S. Law译为英文。

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俄罗斯人逃不出的历史循环

俄罗斯人逃不出的历史循环

谢尔盖·库兹涅佐夫 2014年08月19日

Shepard Sherbell/Corbis Saba

1991年，孩子们在苏联政治家米哈伊尔·伊万诺维奇·加里宁的雕像上玩耍。

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巴黎——勃列日涅夫(Brezhnev)时代即将到来时，我在俄罗斯出生。勃列日涅夫去世时，我是一名高中毕业班的学生。

那时，俄罗斯和乌克兰属于同一个国家，它们之间爆发战争是无法想象的。而现在，许多人担心，俄乌之战迫在眉睫。我和朋友们都看过关于乌克兰反纳粹地下战士的书，就像男孩子看有关骑士和海盗的书一样。任何战争总是"很遥远"——不是发生在很久以前，就是在很远很远的地方。

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在我的孩提时代，世界既安静，又安全。没有人失业、没有乞 丐，也没有无家可归的人——或者可能只是因为我从没遇到过他们。没有可口可乐(Coca-Cola)，也没有麦当劳(McDonald's)，但也没人忍 饥挨饿。当然，电视和报纸上充斥着官方的宣传，但我们会关掉电视，合上报纸，就像我们的孩子避开讨厌的广告一样。

在我的童年，苏联看上去并不像是极权主义的反乌托邦或古拉格的入口。只是很无聊。

上学。读大学。找一份稳定的工作。退休。死。没有挑战，没有意外。没有风险，没有暴力，没有性。很难成为输家，也不可能成为赢家。

无聊。

我真的很讨厌那样。我感觉这像是一个弥天大谎。我确信，在日常生活的表象下隐藏着恐惧。肯定存在有暴力和混乱的地区——在听说监狱集中营和政治压迫之前，我就知道这一点了。

后来，勃列日涅夫去世，我之前一直怀疑的那些混乱浮出了水面。苏联解体了，上世纪90年代成了一个可怕的10年，充斥着暴徒、腐败和贫穷。但我洋洋自得；对骚乱和暴力的猜测，我一直都是对的。

我那一代人着了魔，在那之前，他们即将过上国有单位员工的 乏味生活。一个地下朋克乐队唱道，"为了把莫斯科变成贝鲁特，我们把忧郁留在了过去！"叶利钦(Yeltsin)在1993年10月试图解散议会，之后爆 发了流血冲突。一名年轻的记者在评论相关冲突时感慨道，"我从没想到，竟会看到俄罗斯坦克向俄罗斯议会开火！"他的言语中有一种兴奋，因为他见证了挑战， 也见证了一种出人意料的新现实。

上世纪90年代，我们发现，俄罗斯的历史是循环的。一段枯燥乏味的官僚主义时期，会被一段充斥着骚乱和暴力的时期所取代。所以，斯大林在俄国内战结束后上了台，而勃列日涅夫统治下单调乏味的70年代取代了戏剧性的60年代。

官僚主义预示着皇权和稳定的生活。代价是压迫和谎言。

无政府状态预示着自由和机遇。代价是暴力和恐惧。

到上世纪90年代末，我们中的许多人懊悔自己曾经感到兴 奋。所有人都厌倦了无政府状态。就连十几岁的青少年都开始重视家庭价值观和稳定。这种情绪帮助弗拉基米尔·V·普京(Vladimir V. Putin)迅速上台，入主克里姆林宫。他恢复了我们孩提时代的苏联文化，电视上出现了古老的赞美诗和官方的宣传内容。当然，政治打压和迫害很快便接踵而 至。

勃列日涅夫曾担任苏联领导人18年。普京统治俄罗斯已近 15年。是时候让俄罗斯历史的车轮再次转动起来了。2011年和2012年的反普京集会，首次向人们提醒了这一点；乌克兰独立广场上的革命是第二个提醒。 我猜，普京对这种循环怀有真真切切的恐惧，这正是当下可能爆发的战争的原因之一。

和所有专制政权一样，普京知道如何设立独立的暴力区域。他 在位期间，主要的法外之地是高加索地区，尤其是车臣。过去20年里，许多平民、记者和人权律师在车臣被绑架并遇害。普京会利用任何暴力事件来增强自己的权 力。因而，在2004年的别斯兰恐怖主义袭击后，普京取消了地方行政长官（包括莫斯科的地方行政长官）职位的直接选举，而这在本质上是让他自己去控制相关 人事任命。

边缘地带的乱局可以让一个专制制度更强大。然而，为了维系 自身，这个制度不得不增加赌注。这一次，这块法外之地比以往任何时候都大。普京将俄罗斯车臣式的骚乱输出到了乌克兰东南部，把顿巴斯变成了贝鲁特或加沙， 而不是让红场出现独立广场式革命。现在，所有渴望行动和暴力的人都有地方去杀人和送死。

或许，顿巴斯的民众、乌克兰的军人，乃至马来西亚航空(Malaysia Airlines) MH17航班乘客的死亡，都是为了避免普京统治下的俄罗斯进入一个新的无政府时期。

很容易想象现如今十几岁的男孩，会以我当年的方式，厌恶官方的谎言和乏味。他会看电视，在互联网上看有关英勇的俄罗斯叛乱分子的内容，他会感到兴奋。他会瞥见一种新的现实带来的挑战和惊喜。

现在，就像1993年那位发出感叹的记者一样，我会说，"我从没想到，会看到俄罗斯的一枚火箭弹在顿巴斯上空击落一架马来西亚飞机！"然而，我只感到伤心。历史车轮这次的重新转动，没让我觉得兴奋。一次就够了。

现在我明白了，无聊和骚乱之间的选择，只不过是腐败的统治者用来挽救自己的政权的工具。我希望俄罗斯能及时逃脱这种致命的循环，以避免国内外出现新的受害者。

谢尔盖·库兹涅佐夫(Sergey Kuznetsov)著有小说《蝴蝶皮肤》(Butterfly Skin)。

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It Kills Everything It Touches: On the Perils of Studying Geoff Dyer by Daniel M

It Kills Everything It Touches: On the Perils of Studying Geoff Dyer by Daniel Marc Janes

August 10th, 2014 reset - +

IN THE COURSE of this essay, I want to examine Geoff Dyer and his relationship with the academic establishment. The aforementioned relationship, I will go on to argue, has heretofore been an uneasy one, but the occurrence of a significant, apparently paradoxical event has provided the ideal research opportunity with which to conduct said examination. As I will reveal, this event — the organization of an academic conference in his honor — lays bare the manifest tensions in his work between a hostility to what he considers deadening academic analysis and a profound desire to get closer to his subject. The organization of my essay is as follows.

I cannot blame you if you have stopped reading by now; Geoff Dyer certainly would have. To Dyer, this kind of prose — with its pathological signposting and life-sucking verbosity — exemplifies all that is wrong with the academic world. In a 2011 New York Times column, he eviscerates a work of criticism for precisely these reasons: the art historian Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, whose long-windedness trickles down from its title.

But it is in 1998's Out of Sheer Rage that Dyer truly gets his knives out. The book describes his failed attempts to write a scholarly study of D. H. Lawrence. As he drudges through a Longman Critical Reader on the author, he finds himself increasingly angered by its contents: trendy theoretical titles like "Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality" and "Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence." He wonders:

How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? […] writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.

In Dyer's mind, the academic conference may be the worst offender of all. He goes on to describe his horror on meeting an academic who specialises in Rainer Maria Rilke:

You don't teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.

What happens, then, when academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Geoff Dyer? On July 11, 2014, the Centre for Contemporary Literature at the University of London's Birkbeck College presented the world's first academic conference on the writer. The very concept seems absurd. It's not just what Dyer has said about academia: it's a matter of sensibility. Dyer's mind is discursive, rangy, his style breezy and comic. Surely he is best appreciated as a raconteur, a vacation companion, than pickled in intellectual formaldehyde? What's more, Dyer, like his literary hero John Berger, is profoundly opposed to the idea of specialization. He has described himself as a "literary and scholarly gatecrasher," barging in uninvited on areas of expertise. His approach is that of D. H. Lawrence, who, intent on writing about Etruscan civilization, became frustrated by the academic book he hoped would help him: "Be damned to all authorities! Must take the imaginative line."

To have any success, the conference — entitled "Colours of Memory: an International Conference on the Writing of Geoff Dyer"— would have to take this imaginative line. The dust from the conference hall would have to be cleared out. No small task — and, to raise the stakes higher, Dyer himself would be in attendance.

There were promising early signs of how the conference might channel the spirit of Dyer's works. The call for papers, issued in January, said: "We are open to papers which, like Dyer's writing, experiment with the established boundaries of the genre." The conference program detailed an auspicious cross-disciplinary lineup, with speakers not just from English literature, but also from history, art history, and photography. In a particularly Dyeresque touch, the program contained an exhaustive guide to local coffee shops. ("One of Geoff's favourites I believe!," it said of Patisserie Valerie — though, in what was surely an oversight, it gave no details of each café's doughnut selection.) The conference organizer, Bianca Leggett, a teaching fellow at the British campus of Indiana's Harlaxton College, described her approach as like punk rock: "When people said to punks, 'We hate you! You're scum!' they would reply, 'Yeah! We're scum! Bring it on!'

And yet, the doubt. Can a conference really transcend its essential conferenceness? While the program was in the main pleasingly lucid, there remained possible hints of academic prolixity: the abandoned work as a "self-reflexive text"; the "indexical yet subjective nature of photography"; literary fiction as "a textual reflection of Apollonian and Dionysian opposition." These doubts lingered into the event itself. Down in basement lecture theater B04, it certainly felt like a conference, with its modest attendance (I counted 26 in the first session, though it improved as the day continued) and stock leitmotifs of the conference cycle (the chorus of coughs; the habitual comic twang of a computer error message).

However, when novelist and Vassar professor Amitava Kumar delivered his keynote address, it seemed that all was right with the world. From the outset, it was an impassioned rebuke of academia's "sterile criticism." After quoting Dyer's invective from Out of Sheer Rage, he spurned an academic culture in which "the language of fury" had superseded the language of study; called for a creative criticism that "moves away from solemnity while achieving insight"; and even mocked the overabundance of the "speech mark" gesture, "the lingua franca of all conferences." This was not mere playing to the gallery. The extract that Kumar read from his own book, A Matter of Rats, confirmed how he and Dyer were of one mind. In this segment, the narrator describes how a passionate poem of his, told from a mother to a son, was included in an anthology for college students. After the poem, a sensitive piece about loneliness and the inexorable strain of familial bonds, students were asked: "Explain with reference to the general status of women in our society." "Ah," says the narrator, "the deadening language of academia! The language of understanding instead of the confusion of loss!"

Like a well-chosen opening number, Kumar guaranteed audience goodwill — or at least, we can presume, Geoff Dyer's goodwill. But how well would the speakers heed this call? An early finish meant that fifty minutes elapsed between the end of Kumar's speech and the start of the conference proper — enough time for the atmosphere to cool and the conference to revert to type. And revert to type it did. Introducing his paper "Cocaine and the English," the first speaker, a PhD student in Birkbeck's English department, said: "I'm going to talk about the euphoric and dysphoric effects of drug use." His talk, he said, would compare Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. "I'm going to start with Geoff Dyer," he continued. (The signposting again.) "In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Dyer embraces alterity and the polymorphousness of British identity." (Why not "variability," or "the shifting nature of"?)

There was the possibility that this was an elaborate joke, but the tone seemed too earnest for that. It seemed that Amitava Kumar's keynote was for nothing. It was as if Paul McCartney, after starting with "I Saw Her Standing There," had launched straight into something from Driving Rain. As Dyer sat in the back of the theater, scribbling in his yellow notepad, one could imagine what was going on in his head. 

Next up was Shreepad Joglekar, an Indian photographer and Assistant Professor at Kansas State University. The title of his paper was "Mining the Non-Fiction Work of Art." Speech marks: what would Amitava Kumar think? But there was no talk, say, of how photography matters as art as never before; in fact, it was largely personal, concerned with his own sense of dislocation. It was the first real evidence that this conference was cut from a different mold. Joglekar, a Mumbaikar in Kansas, tried to make sense of his outsider experience using Dyer's writings on both photography and memory and the concept of home. Accompanied by his own droll photographs — a solitary mattress in a Kansas field, a tree in Mumbai somewhat pitifully decorated — he spoke of his childhood in '80s Mumbai and his dreams of American culture, shaped by the coffee culture of Friends and Frasier, the "immaculate and spacious interiors" of Mrs. Doubtfire and Home Alone and the one novel he had read in English, The Fountainhead. It was in the spirit of Dyer, yet firmly stamped with its own personality — auguring well for where the conference could go.

This autobiographical streak was a persistent feature of the papers. From Joglekar on, virtually all of the speakers made connections — some exhaustive, some fleeting — with their own personal experience: as a child growing up in a Suffolk village in the early '90s; as a young man in the era of "GLC [Greater London Council] festivals and CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] posters"; as a jazz-mad student procrastinating from her dissertation. In the cases of freelance writer James Hilton and journalist Elizabeth Minkel, of The New Yorker and The Millions, these experiences were interwoven with their own discovery of Geoff Dyer's writings. Overall, these forays into personal experience had varying degrees of success. Though never less than accomplished, it is debateable how far these reached Dyer's levels of insight.

Anyone who has written about Geoff Dyer will have been tempted to emulate his style, particularly his tendency to digress: "I planned to write about Geoff Dyer but instead I got distracted/stoned/fell asleep." (Of those who resist this urge, most feel obliged to describe this temptation.) However, the point of works like Out of Sheer Rage and Zona is not just that Dyer chronicles his experiences; it is that, for all of the tangents, we still at the end find ourselves closer to Lawrence, closer to Tarkovsky. Personal reminiscence alone did not necessarily make us closer to Dyer — but it was still welcome in shaping the tone. Amid the 'ism's and 'otic's of traditional academic papers, humanity can often be lacking — yet Dyer's work is all flesh and bone, united by a persona that is profoundly, playfully human. 

The flipside of this resolve to keep things human was a reining in of academic excess. Early hiccup aside, each speaker seemed to be observing an unspoken commandment: "Thou shalt not be up thyself." Jonathan Gibbs, a novelist and PhD student, opened his paper on comedy in Dyer with a syllogism: 

"Man is the only animal that laughs." — William Hazlitt
"Man is the only animal that kills for sport." — J.A. Froude
"Man is the only animal that laughs at jokes and then analyses them to death." — Himself

The restraint on display was commendable — but there was also perhaps something slightly oppressive about this united front. Speakers were highly conscious of the smallest potential lurch into obscurity, so they often apologetically moved on as if their parents were telling them to be on their best behavior. Discussing the topic of his first political memory, historian Morgan Daniels, of Queen Mary, University of London, said: "I actually think our first political memory also marks our first awakening to dialectics … but that's just me." In a Q&A, when another of the speakers was asked "Can you tell us more about the labor of the negative, to use an old Hegelian term?," he responded, to general amusement: "No, I can't." There's no doubt that Dyer has his beef with academia — but this level of self-flagellation was not necessary.

There is truth in the picture that Out of Sheer Rage paints, but Dyer knows very well that it's exaggerated. It's easy to forget that, just after delivering his diatribe about academia "killing everything it touches," Dyer goes on to declare this generalization "nonsense": "Scholars live in their work too […] I withdraw [that claim] unconditionally — but I also want to let it stand, conditionally." That said, if over-vigilance is an indemnity against any speeches like the ill-prepared lecture on Lawrence and Englishness that a delirious Dyer improvised in Denmark — "shuttling back and forth" between the three words "English," "man," and "writer," "constructing something that was utterly devoid of substance, totally meaningless" — then it was an acceptable price. 

At its best, the conference seemed to develop its own logic of Dyer-ness. Musing over one's own personal discovery of Dyer was a valid form of tribute — but two papers showed defiantly how one could honor the writer while only fitfully mentioning the writer at all. Matt Harle, a PhD student studying abandoned projects, centered his talk around an abortive rock opera called Roggerio, which a friend had tasked him with reviving. He knew little about the writer, except that "he was the son of rock stars, had taken a lot of drugs, was a significant figure on the internet fiction scene and had recently killed himself." The original text — written, unsurprisingly, in an all-night narcotic haze — was a short treatment, but was a glorious pageant of high folly, involving, among other things, sorceress-psychiatrist called Opiana who makes oxycontin in a witch cauldron and a giant bear-demon called Ursa who stands on street corners selling heroin to children. All this was punctuated with the titles of planned songs that, too, were never written ("Bug Out"; "Hippocratic Oath Up Your Ass"). The revival, naturally, never materialised — but the paper raised questions about the nature of abandoned projects. Are they "textual taxidermy"? Or are they in fact complete works, the set of notes constituting the product? Historian Morgan Daniels, meanwhile, asked the question: "What colour was the 1990s?" Maybe it was green: the rainforest green of environmentalism; the command-prompt green of burgeoning technology. Or maybe it was a mix of grey and orange, like the poster of Trainspotting: the orange of Nickelodeon; the grey of Prime Minister John Major, or the England football team's Euro '96 away kit? Both of these plugged into vital Dyer themes: for Harle, the act of not-writing; for Daniels, the photographic evocation of memory. But not only this, they had a bouncy idiosyncrasy, a swaggering playfulness worthy of the conference subject.

The conference subject, indeed, that was sitting at the back of the lecture theater the whole time. But while the speakers riffed on his works, Dyer was non-interventionist. He simply sat with his notepad, increasing the volume of his own writings. His only intercession, strangely appropriately, was a tangential point about Germany's 7–1 thrashing of Brazil. With the last papers delivered, however, it was Dyer's turn to make the closing remarks — remarks that would serve as a referendum on the conference's success. As he rose to the podium, the mood was ambiguous: he was both the event's raison d'être and its ultimate arbiter. What observations had he been storing up in that yellow notepad of his? Had the conference been a fitting tribute, like Out of Sheer Rage to Lawrence, or was it an enormous folly of Roggerian proportions?

As the applause died down, Dyer pronounced on the proceedings. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't enjoyed myself," he said, flattered if a little baffled. But if there was one thing I have realised, he said, it was this. An expectant pause; audience inhalation. "I'm just an incredibly interesting writer." Droll, buoyant — the audience let go a collective sigh of relief. "I know I'm speaking to you all when I say that a day isn't nearly enough." It was clear he enjoyed the attention, and the rarity of the occasion: "This is the only time that I've been in a seminar or anything like that where I have been the leading authority on the subject." As he spoke, it became apparent how silly it was to fret over Dyer's response. The most compelling feature of Geoff Dyer's writings is Geoff Dyer: the amusing raconteur; the idler-intellectual; the chronic self-deprecator with a high estimation of himself. Of course this was what we would get: how could we expect anything else?

¤

Daniel Marc Janes is the arts editor of Litro Magazine.

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