In this age of perpetual presence, when even that most solitary of creatures, the writer of words, is encouraged—or worse yet, inclined—to develop “platform” and maintain “visibility” by blogging relentlessly (as I do for HTMLGiant) or touring for a solid year (as Stephen Elliott has done for The Adderall Diaries), it’s all too easy to lose track of those writers who appear only when they have something particular and finished to share. Strangely, my two best examples of this kind of writer both go by their initials. The first is the journalist D.T. Max, who will appear in The New Yorker or elsewhere once or twice in a blue moon, always leading me to think: oh yeah—that guy! I love that guy! Where’s he been? The other writer is J.C. Hallman, whose work always excites and intrigues me—whenever, that is, I am reminded he exists.
Hallman is the author of several books, including two nonfiction books published by major houses (another one, In Utopia, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s) and a collection of short fiction (The Hospital for Bad Poets) published by the independent small press Milkweed Editions. His nonfiction book, The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe, (2006) is truly exceptional, a one-of-a-kind volume that interweaves episodes of not-quite-gonzo travel journalism (visits to Druids, Christian wrestlers, a UFO cult, etc., but everyone sustains civility) with a new biographical study of William James. Gentleman is, in my opinion, one of the better nonfiction books of the last, say, five years. (Indeed, my Gmail records show that I liked the book so much I wrote Mr. Hallman a gushing fan letter, just over three years ago to the day today. He wrote back, generously entertaining several volleys of my questions about James, Marilynne Robinson, the Iowa MFA program, and other things, in an occasional correspondence that ran until mid-January of ’07. We haven’t been in touch since that time.)
Back in September, around the time I published my FT interview with Zak Smith, I noticed that Tin House—Smith’s publisher—had also put out an anthology of writing about writing, entitled The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, edited by none other than J.C. Hallman. I immediately requested a review copy, and since that time have been reading, savoring, pondering, taking issue with, being provoked by, and re-reading the thirty-one essays that comprise this highly useful and richly rewarding book.
Story takes its title from a line of James Wood’s essay, “A Reply to the Editors,” published in n+1 in 2005. (“Reply” was a lengthy response to a critique of The New Republic, in which Wood was singled out for particular opprobrium, which n+1 had published the year before.) Here are the relevant lines of the Wood, as quoted in Hallman’s introduction:
“[T]he good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a good story about the story you are criticizing.
How to achieve that retelling? There is a kind of writing through books rather than about them that we recognize in the greatest writer-critics.”
It is this “writing-through” that interests Hallman, whose introduction casts a quick and untrusting eye on all the major factions in the Criticism Wars. He cites the case of Marcus v. Franzen—then he finds for Ozick.
Hallman’s knowingly incomplete, and cheerfully dismissive overview of the history of American literary criticism is not an error of omission or a failure of research, but rather a deliberate choice; it’s simply a fight he has (or would prefer to have) no dog in. He elects instead to focus his efforts on articulating an affirmative vision of the type(s) of criticism he champions. Here is what Hallman is interested in: “a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues, and while it’s never amounted to a formal trend or school, a consistent trickle of this kind of response to literature has flowed like an underground stream all the while the piss battles poisoned the surface.” (Hmm, is that a dog-snarl I’m hearing? Maybe this puppy wants in the ring after all.)
Put a slightly different way, the pieces in Story mostly split the difference between the personal essay and the close reading, and more often than not the result of this “creative criticism” (Hallman’s preferred term) is that we get the best elements of both, such as in Sven Birkerts’s “On a Stanza by John Keats,” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Salinger and Sobs”—the kickstart opener.
We also, naturally, encounter the limits of both approaches, as in “An Author in Search of a Subject,” Frank O’Connor’s essay on Katherine Mansfield. Read on this book’s terms, as one author’s wrestling with the work of a forebear, it’s pretty wonderful. But it’s also quite a piss-boiler, and to preserve that sense of wonder for the duration of your reading, you have to take O’Connor’s nasty condescension and misogyny with so many grains of salt that by the time you’re done reading the piece you feel brined. It’s the biggest problem with inviting people to get personal: sometimes they will.
In any case, there’s great fun to be had in comparing what, how, and how much the same work—or body of work—can mean to different readers. Hallman does his readers an enormous service by including multiple perspectives on several of the “cases.” You get D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville, but you also get Albert Camus. Susan Sontag writes of “Loving Dostoevsky,” while elsewhere in the volume Herman Hesse is irritated by the standard reading of The Idiot‘s Prince Myshkin as a Christ-figure. These are just a few examples. It’s also a pleasure to find little chains of reading—after reading Lawrence on Melville, you turn the page to find Geoff Dyer on Lawrence.
The only truly glaring omission in this book is of Harold Bloom, who is without question the single strongest reader of literature alive today, and whose highly personal approach to reading (and writing about reading)—as well as his utter disdain for all things “theory”—should locate his values (if not his prose-style) squarely in step with Hallman’s own. Indeed, it is hard for me to imagine how the nascent—in name and named-ness, if not existential fact—tradition of “creative criticism” is to burgeon into any kind of self-knowing entity with a history and a forward-trajectory without finding Bloom’s religious-devotional readings of Shakespeare at the center of its canon, even as Bloom has found Shakespeare at the center of his own.
Some other of my favorite pieces from the book: “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume” by Oscar Wilde, “The Humble Animal” (on Marianne Moore) by Randall Jarrell, “Truman Capote Reconsidered” by Cynthia Ozick, Virginia Woolf underwhelmed by Hemingway (“An Essay in Criticism”), “Learning from Eliot” by Seamus Heaney, and especially “Lowell’s Graveyard” by Robert Hass.
It is worth taking a moment here to mention that though readings of poets and poetry account for less than half of the essays in this volume (hardly unexpected given that the word “story” appears twice in its title) they are uniformly among the best of what this book has to offer. Reading the Heaney, the Birkerts, the Hass, and the others offers a series of invaluable lessons not just in the essays’ particular topics (or as an index of their authors’ interests) but in how to read poetry closely and well, a skill that seems today to be practically lost both inside and outside of the academy. I for one am constantly bothered by the notion that my skills as a reader of poetry are less developed than they ought to be, and these essays validated the worst of my concerns—but they also helped me to hone those skills; the diagnosis is the first stage of the cure.
Hass’s reading of Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is so powerful that I’m not sure I’ll ever read the poem the same way again. But the main thing—and this seems to be Hallman’s whole point—is that rather than overwhelming or side-lining my own experience of Lowell, reading the Hass essay filled me with the desire to go re-read the Lowell poem at least as deliberately and fervently as Hass had, and see for myself what was there. He made me want to feel, if not precisely what he felt, then something else—whatever else—as long as it was just as strong.
The lesson these essays all teach—apart from who they’re by, what they’re about, or anything else specific to any given one of them—is that there is no substitute for reading as an act of intimate protracted exchange, conducted with passion, in a state of profound enrapture. If this sounds like a description of an act of physical love, it should. This seems to me to be what Susan Sontag was getting at, nearly fifty years ago, in Against Interpretation, when she wrote that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Better late than never, I suppose. Though, to Hallman’s point, this kind of writing about writing has actually always been around, you just had to know where to look for it. For anyone looking today, it seems silly to do anything other than start here.
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Justin Taylor is the author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial). He blogs for HTMLGiant.com and his own website is Justindtaylor.net.
Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. He lives in Brooklyn and at http://www.justindtaylor.net/ pan> ...
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Charles D'Ambrosio, D.T. Max, htmlgiant, J.C. Hallman, James Wood, Stephen Elliot, Susan Sontag, Sven Birkerts, The New Yorker, Tin House
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