by Clive James
If she has a deaf spot, it lies on that wing. Favouring, with good reason, the American vernacular, she tends to set it up as something that supersedes European formality, as if it were possible for a poem to be over-constructed. But it can’t. It can only be underpowered. If she had paid the same pin-point attention to the complex interplay within Toomer’s four-square quatrains as she pays to William Carlos Williams’s free verse in ‘The Wheelbarrow’, she would have been able to show how a superficially mechanical form can intensify conversational rhythms by the tightness with which it contains them. It would have been a useful generosity. Anthony Hecht’s reputation was injured when Helen Vendler found his forms limiting. On the contrary, they were limitless. As for Wilbur, his fastidiously carpentered post-war poems were part of the American liberation of Europe. Whether that liberation was a new stage in American cultural imperialism’s road to conquest remains a nice question. One would like to have heard her answer. Such a discussion would lie well within her scope. But our disappointment that she stops short is a sign of her achievement. It we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that’s an endorsement.
Occasionally there is cause for worry that her young students might listen too well. Three short poems by Theodore Roethke are praised without any warning that most of his longer poems, if the reader goes in search of them, will prove to be helpless echoes of bigger names. Ambition undid him, as it has undone many another American poet infected by the national delusion that the arts can have a Major League. The short poem by Frank O’Hara should have been marked with a caveat: anything longer by the same poet will be found to have a lot less in it, because the urge to find a verbal equivalent for the apparent freedom of New York abstract expressionist painting led him to believe that he could mean everything by saying anything. Nor are we told that Robert Lowell would spend the later and incoherently copious part of his career making sure that he would never again attain the rhetorical magnificence of the opening lines of ‘Man and Wife’. But Paglia knows why, and how, those lines are magnificent: and in Lowell’s case, among her specific remarks, there is a general one that typifies her knack of extending an aesthetic question into the moral sphere. Lowell’s ‘confessional’ streak insulted his loved ones. The same question is posed again by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, an agonised masterpiece by which Paglia is driven to a stretch of critical writing that stands out for its richness even in a rich book.
Applying her particularised admiration to rescue the poem from those who cite it as a mantra, Paglia points out an awkward truth about Plath as a feminist Winged Victory: that her poetry was in ‘erudite engagement with canonical male writers’. A still more awkward truth is that the manner of Plath’s suicide helped to set up her husband Ted Hughes as an abuser of women. Paglia defends Hughes against Plath, a defence that few feminists have dared to undertake. She also defends Plath’s father against Plath, which might seem a quixotic move in view of the poem’s subject matter, but does help to make the point that Plath, by calling her father a Nazi and identifying herself with millions of helpless victims, was personalising the Holocaust in a way that only her psychic disturbance could excuse. Leaving out the possibility that Plath might have been saying she was nuts, Paglia does Plath the honour of taking her at her word. But you can’t do her that honour without bringing her down off her pedestal. The poet used her unquestionable talent to say some very questionable things, and there’s no way out of it. Paglia is tough enough to accept that conclusion: tough enough, that is, not to complain when she winds up all alone.
She seems to enjoy being alone. It’s a handy trait for the sort of thinker who can’t see an orthodoxy form without wanting not to be part of it. Google her for half an hour and you will find her fighting battles with other feminists all over cyberspace. Telling us how she became, at the age of four, a ‘lifelong idolator of pagan goddesses’ after seeing Ava Gardner in Showboat, she tells us why she is less than thrilled with Madonna. It’s a view I share, but at least Madonna manufactured herself. Ava Gardner from South Carolina was manufactured in a Hollywood studio, as she was the first to admit. And what is Paglia doing, saying that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has ‘the mentality of a pancake’? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet’s dialogue in Wag the Dog? And what about her performance in One Kill? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Paglia by now should be famous enough to start throttling back on some of the stuff she is famous for. She might make a start with bitchery, for which she has a taste but no touch. The media want snide remarks from her the same way that the Sahara wants rain. But writers capable of developing a nuanced position over the length of an essay should not be tempted into believing that they can sum it up in a sound-bite. Liberal orthodoxy will always need opposing, but not on the basis that all its points are self-evidently absurd. According to Paglia, gun abuse is a quirk of the sexually dysfunctional. That might be right, but people aren’t necessarily deluded when they want a ban for the sort of gun that can kill a dozen people in half a minute. Waiting until everybody is sexually functional would be a long time to hold your breath.
Nor does Paglia’s useful conviction that feminism, as an ideology, is as debilitating for individual responsibility as any other ideology make it true that women are now out of the woods. Only the misapprehension that she can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was ‘an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality’. On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can’t be convincing even when they masturbate.
But all these posturings by the madly glamorous Paglia happen only because, in the electrified frenzy of the epochal moment, she forgets that the light-storm of publicity makes her part of the world of images. In her mind, if not yet in her more excitable membranes, she knows better than to mistake that world for the real one. This book on poetry is aimed at a generation of young people who, knowing nothing except images, are cut off from ‘the mother ship’ of culture. The mother ship was first mentioned in her 2002 lecture called ‘The Magic of Images’. In the same lecture, she put down the marker that led to this book. ‘The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.’ She can say that again, and let’s hope she does, in a longer edition of a book that shows her at her true worth. When you have proved that you can cut the mustard, it’s time to cut the malarkey.
New York Times, March 27, 2005
Postscript
One way of summing up Camille Paglia would be to say that she looks like the classiest number in the bar until the fight breaks out. It isn’t that she doesn’t watch her words: she watches them to make sure they are going the wrong way. One is forced to conclude that publicity is the sea in which she swims, beating it to a phosphorescent froth. But we should not let her effulgence blind us to her importance. Break, Blow, Burn is an important book in a movement we should all favour: the movement to restore the ideal of the self-contained poem to a superior position over the more marketable notion of poetry as a generalized and infinitely teachable commodity. I thought my review had unmistakably praised her for this initiative, so I was quite stunned to find some of the American cultural bloggers accusing me of having done a knife-job. The noisiest bloggers are often the most stupid, and probably the worst you can say of Camille Paglia is that she sometimes sounds as if she might like to hang out with them, always granted that hanging out is something they ever do. You would expect someone with so formidable a mind to fight shy of petty quarrels. I can think of no contemporary cultural figure who would so benefit from being less available. She should stay in more.
THE GUIDEBOOK DETECTIVES
If you’ve spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it’s hard to resist the idea that there might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for example. After all, quite a few literary masterpieces spend much of their turgid wordage being almost as contrived as any crime novel you’ve ever raced through. On page thirteen of my edition of The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy is waiting for her father to appear. ‘He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in . . .’ But of course she knew that; knew it so well that she wouldn’t have to think about it; she is only thinking about it so she can tell us. If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can’t it have some guns?
It’s been a long time since Sherlock Holmes cracked his first case, and by now every country in the world must have at least one fictional detective with half a dozen novels to his name. Some countries seem to have half a dozen fictional detectives with twenty or thirty novels each. Can’t even one of these current sleuths be surrounded by classy prose like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, so that we can get the art thrill and the thriller thrill both at once? Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. Great idea, great sound, great sociological significance. But above all, an eventful narrative to make you read on. Something unputdownable, to make you feel less bad about the unpickupable, such as The Wings of the Dove, which surely deserves everlasting blame for the kind of sentence it so wilfully refuses to include. ‘Kate Croy looked up at the fully dressed but headless corpse hanging from the ceiling fan and realised with a surge of fear that unless there was another equally well-tailored man with the same cuff-links, this was her father . . .’
If the author does that kind of stuff well enough, he starts counting as literature. That’s the possibility that keeps us, the readers, on the case: the search for the gripping story that counts as good writing as well. It could be that we are dodging our obligations to high art, but for as long as Patricia Highsmith brings a poetic touch to the narrative details of how the central character of Deep Water just happens, in the swimming pool at night, to lean on the rival for his wife’s affections and hold him under, are we really going to kick ourselves for not having finished reading that novel by Willa Cather? There can be no question that the best genre fiction has always aimed, and sometimes successfully, at usurping literature’s place. The question is about the extent to which the crime writers have dominated genre fiction. In answer to that, even the science-fiction writers would have to admit that the crime writers have pretty well taken over. Magic sells more copies because magic includes J. K. Rowling, but crime has more writers, with a different crime-fighter for every writer.
In all the European languages, there were many famous fictional crime-fighters after the demise of Sherlock Holmes and before the advent of Maigret, but it was Maigret’s prolific inventor, Georges Simenon, who really started the crime novel on the way to its current aspiration to seriousness. Supposedly helping to fuel the aspiration, but perhaps also helping to ensure that it can rarely attain its object, is the presence of a recognisably characterised detective. There had always been a space-warp area in which gifted writers wrote noir books that hovered trembling between thrills and thoughtfulness, but without a star detective the gifted writers had trouble writing enough of them, and one of the imperatives of the genre-fiction business is that you must publish enough books to survive in a market where everybody else is publishing a lot of books for the same reason. It helps to have your own sleuth and get people hooked on him. Simenon, with the organisation and instincts of a Colombian drug-runner, got the whole world hooked on Maigret.
Not only did Maigret sell by the million in every tongue and in all media, literary critics praised his author’s stripped-down style. Though it could be said that the style was stripped-down because Simenon was essentially styleless – he said he spent hours taking out the adjectives, but he also said he was irresistible to women – nevertheless he acquired such prestige for Maigret that his action novels without Maigret in them started counting as proper novels, the absence of the star turn being thought of as a sign of artistic purity.
Seriousness is a tag that most genre writers can be counted on to covet, even when they have made a good fist of seeming to despise it. Soon a new, specially commissioned novel by the Edinburgh author Ian Rankin will be serialised in the New York Times, a prospect which has already attracted attention in the upmarket British press, as when the occasional British astronaut is deputed by NASA to do the blindfolded bean-counting experiment in Earth orbit. But apparently Rankin’s famous Inspector Rebus won’t be in the story.
Interviewed by the London Independent about this startling act of self-abnegation, Rankin sounded the way Fred Astaire once did when he suggested that his forthcoming appearance in On the Beach would be a heaven-sent opportunity not to dance. For Rankin’s fans all over the world, Rebus is the ideal sleuth: a maverick (of course) cop who drinks so hard that he gets another hangover from inhaling his current hangover, he keeps his job only by the kind of deductive brain that can operate even when bombed. In Britain he is played on television by Ken Stott, with a magnificently burred accent and a rack of luggage beneath each eye.
Looking and sounding like a man who has slept under a reclining horse, Rebus will be a big absence from this new story. But the new story will still be set in Edinburgh, which has the advantage, even as it becomes more prosperous, of offering, along with plenty of well-preserved classical architecture, an infinite number of equally well-preserved dank staircases leading down into squalid areas where Rankin’s reeking hero can find bodies in even worse condition than his own. Other Scots detectives get to operate in the less ambiguous setting of Glasgow, where far fewer classical outlines have survived to frame the rough stuff. To indicate that they are not pampered, the actors who play the Glasgow flatfeet on television say ‘murghder’ instead of ‘murder’. With throats that hurt from the accent, and teeth chipped from being gritted, Glasgow tecs are tougher. But Edinburgh looks better, a fact bearing implications to which we might return.
Most lone detectives belong to a police force nowadays, because it gives the writer an easier task: in a police station, there are a lot of other personnel for the hero to interact with. In the days when the lone detective was alone, he interacted mainly with the bottle, a` la Philip Marlowe, who had nothing else in the top drawer of his filing cabinet. Even with Marlowe, the action improved when the regular cops showed up, so that Marlowe could hate them and they could hate him back. A requirement of today’s lone detective is that the police force he serves in is riven by faction if not corruption. This is where Italy scores heavily. With dozens of differently uniformed Italian police forces jostling for position to get on the take, there are plenty of mean streets available for a man not himself mean to walk down. Also – a factor we should note now in case we need it later – a lot of the Italian streets are lined with attractive old buildings. Against such an inherently interesting background, the swarming lone detectives are in many cases invented by writers who are not native Italians, but just visiting.
My younger daughter, an expert on crime fiction, was the one who tipped me off that the Italian maverick cop who really counted was Inspector Brunetti, created by Donna Leon. Inspector Brunetti operates in Venice. Donna Leon, however, is not Venetian, or even Italian. She might have lived in Venice for twenty years, but she benefits mightily from the outsider’s traditional love of the Serenissima. Donna Leon is an American, and although the Brunetti novels are bestsellers in many languages, she has so far not allowed their translation into Italian. Thus her fans are either non-Italians or else Italians who read foreign languages. It seems a fair guess that the factor uniting them all is a sad involvement with Venice. In every fan’s first-pick Brunetti novel, Acqua Alta, she gives intimate details of the decaying city while never delaying the action for a mome
nt. Hers is an unusually potent cocktail of atmosphere and event. People get addicted. There will be another Donna Leon out imminently, but meanwhile, in our house, everyone is lining up to read the last one.
Always vowing to give up soon, by now I have read at least half a dozen Brunetti novels and have got well past the stage of remembering what happens in which book, even though the author, for the length of time it takes to read the text, is pretty good at not letting background detail overwhelm foreground action. You always know which canal the body is in, but the inspector never takes his eye off the way it has been lashed to the piling. (‘Although the fish and crabs had been at her during the high water of September, he knew it must be the Englishwoman, Kate Croy . . .’) Inspector Brunetti is happily married and eats well, the way Maigret used to when Madame Maigret fixed his lunch. Usually, in this sort of book, the sleuth is divorced, eating badly off a snatched sandwich, and drinking hard, especially if he is Irish. But Inspector Brunetti can’t wait to get home to his hot wife and her subtle tricks with the calamari. He is kept on the case, however, by crimes of rare intricacy that would take time to solve even if he were not frustrated all the way by an incompetent senior officer. Meanwhile the beautiful city sinks slowly but irretrievably into a sea of corruption. Down these means streets a man must row who is not himself mean.
Another of the vast crowd of Italian lone detectives, Inspector Zen, is also the creation of a non-Italian, Michael Dibdin: based in Seattle, background in England and Northern Ireland. Typical among Dibdin’s several Zen novels, Vendetta reveals that Dibdin commands a precisely literate prose. He knows what it means to ‘eke out’, for example. But he doesn’t know that the action would move faster if Inspector Zen didn’t take what feels like a hundred pages to get across Rome, mentally noting every detail, as if he were a writer. Since Zen is nominally functioning in the Criminalpol section of the Ministry of the Interior, and is already unpopular with his superiors for being too honest – no wonder he’s divorced – this tendency to annotate the atmosphere can only hurt his image. The disadvantage of an author’s being a straniero is thereby starkly revealed. Non-Italians find Italy too fascinating. There is thus room for the homegrown writer to score on the level of economical evocation.
