On the other hand, my novel has been listed as a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Historical Fiction. Long live art.

Literary hermitage has a nice ring to it, but like most things, its enjoyment probably depends on the details. I’ve been reading the relevantly-titled In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, translated by Red Pine (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and encountered again, in these wonderful poems of the eighth century, the idea of retreating to a place to be able to hear oneself think.

Chinese court officials and scholars who wrote poetry (and there were an astounding number, evidently; someone compared them to Tweeters) often had a very civilized idea of hermitage, one that would allow them to write in comfortable homes in beautiful natural surrounds, with family and visitors available, and plenty of joy in the wine jar. Wei’s work is often filled with loss, regret, and longing from war, the death of his wife while their children were still young, and the tumbling fortune of his family, who’d been prominent for generations. But when he talks about “this life of seclusion,” there are quiet ecstasies and freedom: “after the lightest of rains last night / spring plants all at once appeared / dark mountains were suddenly bright / birds circled my hut and sang / sometimes I join men of the Way / sometimes I follow woodcutters….”

(The painting at left, showing a scholar taking his ease, is one that my mom brought back from Vietnam in the Sixties. I don't know its provenance.)

The cover of the collection is a detail from a painting called Ten Views of My Ideal Hut, by Lu Hung, a near-contemporary of Wei. (See The Birth of Landscape Painting in China: The Sui and T’ang Dynasties, by Michael Sullivan [U of California, 1962]). The painting shows a trim little house with a soup pot visible through the door, a fenced garden with an orchard of some kind, and a sizable garden shed where the owner kept his mower, all in front of a canyon and mountains for walking and contemplation.

(The painting is at the National Palace Museum, Taipei, but isn’t part of their digital collection yet. Take a look instead at Dwelling in the Fu-Ch’un Mountains, by Huang Kung-wang [1269-1354] or After the Line "Idly Watching Children Catch Willow Flowers" by Chou Ch'en [ca. 1460-after 1535]. It’s the prejudice of the present in technocratic America to think that life couldn’t have been satisfying without microwave popcorn, but the Chinese had some things figured out a long time ago.)

I fully intend to update the ancient tradition of literary hermitage one day, but for now I’m afraid I’m with early Wei: “I finally saw what caused my troubles / but when I thought about building a hut / I knew it would have to wait for old age[.]” In the meantime I can dream over others’ attempts.

Many are amusing for their relative opulence. Were they really hermitages? I think so, at least psychologically: Gustave Flaubert was famously called “the hermit of Croisset,” but here’s a painting of his house on the Seine; it’s significant that when he shouted his prose aloud in order to tune his writer’s ear, he frightened the servants. Tolstoy had Yasnaya Polyana; Chekhov had a place in Yalta, where he could be a genius and die by inches of tuberculosis.

Robinson Jeffers built his own hermitage on Carmel Point; surely the rigors of making all that “stone love stone” qualify. I know Thoreau would never have taken it on.

Mark Twain, who liked a good time as much as anybody, worked in at least a couple of cabins over the years, including this one up on Jackass Hill, and this considerably less rustic one in Elmira, New York. Ernest Hemingway retreated to Key West to write, but when the people came he fled across the straits of Florida, and then to Idaho. He may have chosen out-of-the-way locales so he could work, but he was in favor of “the best of everything.”

I’d be interested in one day having something in size between the family compound of the Chinese poet-recluse and the packing box that Thoreau suggested living in. It’s done pretty well here, even ingeniously, if a tad on the Kaczynski side. Elsewhere, designer Mark Moskovitz’s “writer’s cabin” was displayed, funnily enough, in the atrium of the DaimlerChrysler Financial Services headquarters in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. (Click on the photo repeatedly to advance through the site.)

Finally, this one is perfect, my ideal hut, but no writer I know could afford it.

For now I sit on our bed, in the room I painted a deep cheerful yellow, next to the bookcase I built, looking out the second-story window at people passing on the walk. “I come here to be alone with my thoughts,” Wei writes. “I regret lacking social skills[.]”

There are many difficulties in making black squiggles on a piece of white paper meaningful, but one subset might be in using the tools of specialized literacy to portray those who do not often have the same tools.

Last week my acquaintance Rory wanted to discuss his continued musings on the working class. He’d been thinking about what it means to portray in good faith the experience of, say, manual laborers. He wondered if beautiful language, as in lyric poetry, distorted and eroticized experience that was hard or ugly.

That is, when the poet speaks beautifully of “love’s austere and lonely offices” in relation to a father, “cracked hands that ached / from labor,” lighting the morning fire in an abusive house filled with “chronic angers,” does he miss something he nearly caught?

On the other hand, isn’t one of the poet’s responsibilities to juxtapose, as in these lines from B.H. Fairchild’s “The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano”:

The bit shears the dull iron into new metal, falling
into the steady chant of lathe work,
and the machinist lights a cigarette, holding

in his upturned palms the polonaise he learned at ten,
then later the easiest waltzes,
etudes, impossible counterpoint….

If literature’s great capacity is the representation of individual experience that transcends and speaks to the human, what’s it mean to write those experiences artfully or honestly?

I recalled to Rory the introduction of the book Bloody Williamson, a history of the county where I’m from and an important source for my own two books. Its author, Paul Angle, was the director of the Chicago Historical Society from 1945–1964, a professional scholar, and not from Southern Illinois. He says that when he began spending time there in the ‘40s and ‘50s,

I came to take it as a matter of course that I should spend an hour, one evening, talking with a Marion businessman about the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the relative merits of the various editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica—subjects about which his information far exceeded mine. “I keep goin’ back to the ninth edition time after time,” he said in the edgeless drawl that reminds one of Egypt’s [Southern Illinois’] proximity to the South, “because of the high authority of the articles.” He mentioned Huxley and Darwin, and in philosophy Leibnitz [sic] and Schopenhauer. “And who was that monism fellow?” he asked. “I can’t think of his name.” I took two wild shots: “Kant? Fichte?” He shook his head, and we talked of other matters. “I’ve got it,” he said as we parted. “Hegel!”

Angle not only hints at a chance meeting in order to make a counter-assertion about a region judged as rough-and-ready; he reinforces his fallacy of insufficient sample by bringing in a second, like-minded, person:

On another evening, in Herrin, the talk ran to fine printing, to an obscure pamphlet of Sir Thomas Browne’s that my host had not been able to find, to London antiquarian booksellers, to the maps in William Camden’s Britannia, which lay open before us.

Angle drops that phrase “as a matter of course” but goes on to say, “I do not mean to imply that such interests are the rule in Williamson County….” But the implication remains, and he never admits that both his examples were newspaper editors, college educated, and not chance acquaintances at all but men working closely with Angle on his book.

All this could be lumped into the problem of “honest portrayals of class,” which is much on Rory’s mind these days. His own aesthetic dictates whiskey, boots (cowboy and work), inflammable fuel, and a pistol or two.

My own assumptions, in fiction, include: All characters have various and often rich inner lives; are largely aware of class and where they exist in it; understand their own suffering and joy about as much as anyone else does; understand processes and lines of thought without formal training; and should speak and be described in a language that translates their culture and views but doesn’t demean or prejudge them. (“Ain’t” shore is hard to git away with, ‘lessen you want to grind into the reader that yer characters ain’t had no book-larnin’.)

The same issues manifest themselves in depictions of rural and inner city, of military life (the last of the Home Fires dispatches yesterday at the Times says there’s a lack of roundedness in portrayals of the soldier), of childhood, of the past, and anything else romanticized in the Rousseauian mode, especially when those portrayed do not have the power—politically, legally, narratively, chronologically—to counter others’ representation of them.

I remember when the first of the Jane Austen movies came out with actors in visibly dirty clothes (was it Persuasion?), greasy hair, and teeth made up to look as if they’d only ever been brushed with twigs and salt. Everyone looks a little tired and unwell. I thought, Yes, it's an addition to the verisimilitude of the story, which I hadn’t even thought to miss. (Not everyone thinks so. According to one IMDb reviewer, the American video box replaced “the demure [British] leads with two glamorous models…a spokeswoman for Columbia Tristar…said, ‘I guess to make it a little more seductive to us over here.’”)

In a mini-documentary called “The Hundred Days,” on the special features disk for the film Master and Commander, director Peter Weir says he remembers seeing pictures coming out of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall in ’89, and that the faces of the people had a blankness, a lack of prepared persona for the cameras, which he knew he needed for his period film, so he cast many non-actors from bars and docksides. In a swipe at the Merchant-Ivory aesthetic, he says he never wanted scenes of beautiful carriage rides through architecture, that he wanted the film set at sea, with the feeling of the sea, and he dirtied everybody up and put tobacco stains on their teeth. But he also says he didn’t want to make a genre swashbuckler, and when the doctor (Paul Bettany) eats sandwiches among a bale of Galapagos tortoises, restful chamber music plays on the soundtrack, instead of there being silence or the sound of wind and tortoise grunts.

Much of portrayal in writing is the ineffable effect of what we think of as mere style, some amalgam of diction, music, imagery, and texture. It would seem to make sense that form and function should match, but Henry James’s great novel What Maisie Knew gets away with a sublime trick: A child serves as James’s “central intelligence,” so her consciousness sounds like mid-period Henry James:

The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.

Paul Theroux, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, says, “[S]he often seems like a grown-up novelist rendered small and fitted into a frock and given a taste for chocolates and an ability to play dumb.” He’s not complaining, really.

Should part of the responsibility in the portrayal of others be that the writing is accessible to, or comfortable for, its subjects? Where would that limit be? I’ve been reading Declan Kiberd’s terrific Ulysses and Us (Norton, 2009), which angrily insists that Joyce’s novel was intended for the common person on the street but got waylaid by specialists in the academy. I read Ulysses in an independent study with a well-known Joyce scholar and still found it difficult.

Modernism—going back at least to Flaubert—assigned itself a project titled No Easy Heroisms, which included less exalted figures, more interiority (where things tend to get more muddled), and more uncertain and elliptical outcomes. The work of the last decades has been to dismantle the heroism of the story itself, in a project titled Every Narrative is Suspect. All this, one might say, has been in service to an attempt at honesty in what’s conveyed about lives lived.

What's honest next?

I was just wondering about interesting new ways Google Maps might be integrated into narratives. Now how about taking an online video journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans Siberian Railway, with a corresponding interactive Google map at hand, accompanied by oral readings from Tolstoy or Gogol, in Russian? Or to the sound of rumbling wheels, balalaika and accordion, or Russian radio? (It’s good for international relations to be reminded that DJs sound like tools worldwide.) Try crossing the Volga or skirting the Barguzin mountains, the video landscape passing the train window, and the map set to “satellite” so you see the terrain from high above even as you travel across it. I hate even to suggest this, but the whole thing looks like some kind of ultra-secret CIA training device for agent escape-and-evasion. It’s all awfully cool and is courtesy of Google and Russian Railways (via our friend the excellent Bud Parr).

I’m working on something, so you might see repeated mention here of deep-sea diving in the next year. I’ll try to keep it down. But come on: A deep-sea diver puppet the size of a four-story building being walked through the streets? Even for street theater it’s one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen.

Our friend Neil Verma at Ducks and Drakes takes a look at a dictionary so special it’s a reminder that “the idea of a dictionary is, at its core, a speculative fiction. That’s what makes it sexy.” Dictionaries sexy? Agreed.

During heated discussions my acquaintance Rory will often flop out his PhuD—thud!—to impress interlocutors. Now anyone can look like the smartest chappie in the literary pub, with the recent paperback release of Who Killed Iago?: A Book of Fiendishly Challenging Literary Quizzes, by James Walton (Perigee/Penguin, 2009). Walton, who’s hosted a quiz show called The Write Stuff on BBC Radio 4 for more than decade, includes rounds of questions based on miscellany, extracts, featured authors, and links among literary people or things. Or so he says in the intro; I can’t see the organization easily while browsing. But maybe dipping-into-at-random is what the book’s best for anyway, other than memorizing the answers to show up the Rory in your life.

Upright Among Staring Fish

We all of us are deep-sea divers
peering out of bone helmets
at a world lost in the flood.
Fogged wonders, marvels in the murk.

Okay, Red Diver? asks the voice down the umbilical,
machinery gasping and chattering in the background.

Okay Red, he reports.

The same mile and its return,
three times a week,
forty weeks a year,
more than a decade’s plod.

Two thousand nautical miles, San Francisco to Honolulu,
leaning into a prairie straight wind, slipping on sidewalk rime.

Okay, Red?

Divers are dressed by others, like children by their mothers,
suit, collar, belt, gloves, boots, hat, protection against the world.
One hundred-ninety pounds of brass, canvas, leather and lead,
nearly weightless in the sea but still this burden: not a fish.

This is my life, he thinks behind the faceplate. How strange.
This is my life. This is my life.

Okay, Red?

Hiss and gurgle of the mammal in full immersion.
Walking a compromise between bouncing off the bottom
and being stuck in silt, the quicksand of dreams.
Sustained falling as repose.

The intense concentration of self
in no topside furor.

Okay, Red?

Faces float past: Puffer, flounder, shark, eel.
Hubcap starfish in the mud. Giant clam of a dumpster.
Bone-white hawthorne against the sky, branches stark as dead coral.
Candy wrappers involuted like nudibranchs.

Have you entered the springs of the sea and
walked in search of the depth?

One of my former professors used to say that when he eventually retired he’d sit around all day in his jammies watching (Ingmar) Bergman films. That sounds pretty good to me, but he still hasn’t retired at 82. Maybe he will by the time I do, in 25 years or so, and we’ll watch together.

I love film and other visual media and try to use it in classes when I can justify it. If I’m looking for something specific there’s always hopes that YouTube and Hulu will have something useful for discussions, but as usual, the good stuff is put up on the high shelf where the kids can’t get to it.

That is, the country has many good film archives for on-site scholarly use, such as the Chicago Film Archives, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Other archives are more specialized, such as the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University Bloomington, JewishFilm.com, and the National Anthropological Archives, a branch of the Smithsonian.

Other places have the good stuff too, but they’re for-profits that charge licensing fees to documentarians, TV shows, and advertisers, and my kind would not be welcome there. Get a tantalizing glimpse of world travel clips licensed by Getty Images, which I could watch all day. Or the Americana reel at the WPA Film Library (“these are your neighbors”).

In any case, here’s one list of film archives at a site run by Cleveland State, and another terrific one at the National Film Preservation Board Public Moving Image Archives and Research Centers (the Smithsonian) that has lists of archives in each state and many in foreign countries.

But I don’t have the funds, time, or necessity to visit these places in person, so I’m always happy to find high-quality, free, online digitized resources I can search quickly for material to use in classes.

How about downloadable scripts of hundreds of well-known films and TV shows? Screenwriting, acting, film, cultural studies, and other students will appreciate Drew’s Script-O-Rama. Don’t pretend you’re not going to start memorizing lines from Purple Rain tonight.

Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications along with its allied site, Museum.TV, has 7,000 hours of TV and radio programming digitized (out of more than 100,000 hours-worth in their collections), as well as 12,000 commercials and 3,000 photographs. They also have web pages curated for Black History Month, Top 125 Political Moments, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and more.

The Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has excellent and moving film that would be great in history classes.

The Academic Film Archive of North America has digital holdings too and is partnered with the Internet Archive, one of the most interesting, versatile, and potentially time-sucking resources I’ve used of late. They also have a live music archive, an audio archive, and a textual archive.

At the Internet Archive, you can find Buster Keaton’s silent comedy “College”; a public service/social engineering ad on venereal disease with confused visual rhetoric (everyone’s happy and attractive); and an army training film from 1944 that came out of the Warner cartoon studios, with Mel Blanc doing a Bugs Bunny voice for a different character, and what might be the first instance of the “Endearing Young Charms” piano gag in it.

Pack your jammies and come on over. And bring that Purple Rain script.

I’d forgotten how fun, even exciting, the early stages of research on a novel can be. This week I’ve gotten to shop for boats, since one of the characters in the novel I’m writing owns and probably lives on one. He longs to impress people with it, but it’s some hulk he dragged off a tidal flat in Central America, and he’s barely got the cash to buy the diesel its misfiring engines guzzle.

Getting educated on what kinds of boats are available; what shape they’re in; what they cost to buy, repair, maintain, run, and berth; what their respective drafts are—all this is great fun and, I think, useful. My reactions now are of the novice who’s been on a few boats. They’re good to have for characters watching this guy rumble in to the marina in a cloud of smoke while they’re trying to eat their crab cakes. But when I know enough about the specific boat I choose to portray to know not only that when the hydraulic helm unit fails I can rig an emergency tiller to steer manually, but also that the tiller gets pushed in the opposite direction from a functioning wheel, then I can start to understand some things about his character. What people know how to do is always interesting to me.

I had no idea so many different kinds of vessels are available to the public, or how little money it would take, relatively speaking, to buy something that could get you into big trouble so quickly, from a freighter to a surplus military cutter to a floating hotel. The media’s having fun with Tiger Woods’ Valentine’s Day gift to his wife of a $3 million dive boat. After my research this week, all I could think was: He could have gotten several very interesting boats for that amount of money, with enough left over to pay somebody to scuttle them for the insurance money when his wife left him anyway.

My dad used to repeat the old adage: The two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. I get to experience both without actually paying for anything, or chipping and painting.

Still, it’s hard to remain entirely detached. My acquaintance Rory took me to lunch on Friday to give me all sorts of advice about my writing, career, and life. I wanted to do something nice for him in return, so I used his credit card number to put a significant down payment on a trim little pleasure craft that I know he’ll enjoy puttering around in. In the off season it’ll look great dry docked in his back yard. Currently the ship’s in Itacoatiara, where she’s been doing liner service on the Amazon. The current owners are expecting Rory to take possession by the end of this month. They’re very excited, and he should probably be there on time.

While I had his billing info, I couldn’t resist also putting in a bid on a little something I’ve had my eye on. I like to imagine that when Rory comes steaming through the notoriously difficult Mona Passage, bound for home, I’ll be waiting in the Puerto Rico Trench to tell him all about how to write truly.

Starbuck, who’s seven, wanted to know the rest of the lyrics to the sea chantey “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor,” which I’m assuming he heard on Muppet Treasure Island. Verses ring truer in some versions online than in others, especially those with inventive and nautically-plausible ways of punishing the sailor: “Put him in the bilge and make him drink it”; “Tie him to the taffrail when she's yard-arm under”; and “Soak him in [whale?] oil ‘til he sprouts some flippers….”

Wolfie, who’s four, was interested too if only because Starbuck was. As I drove Wolfie to school yesterday he wanted to know what was being implied in the punishment, “Throw him in bed with the captain’s daughter….” I had to think about that myself, and my mind spun like a windlass with possibilities. I just said the captain wouldn’t like it.

“And the captain would slice,” he said, waving an imaginary broadsword.

That seemed astonishingly perceptive for four, but I was afraid to know what he thought the captain would slice.

Luckily he can’t remember lyrics too well, because when I walked him through the doors of the Montessori, he was loudly singing the benign chorus instead: “Weigh-hey, and up she rises; weigh-hey, and up she rises….”

It could be worse, I know. My mom, who taught elementary school, used to tell stories about kids repeating things their parents were saying at home. One big fourth-grader with a buzz cut used to bounce in his seat in her classroom and sing gleefully, “Red-hot mama in a panty girdle….”

I have the sixth largest library in the United States of America. Technically it’s not mine of course, but I do have full access to all the stacks and am allowed to check out an unlimited number of books for months at a time and to renew them endlessly. Maybe we should just refer to my house as the forty-first branch of the forty-branch system spread around campus and leave it at that.

One of the books on my shelf, which I see by the checkout slip I’ve had and been dipping into repeatedly since March 2007, is Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, by J. Gerald Kennedy (Yale UP, 1993). Kennedy is William A. Read Professor of English at LSU and a scholar of Poe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, literary nationalism, and modernism.

In Imagining, Kennedy takes up some of my own preoccupations: What is place, how does it manifest similarly yet idiosyncratically in different minds, and what does it mean to represent a place in narrative? Here, of course, he deals with the “axis mundi,” the city at the center of the world, and how it “affected the career of each writer [Gertude Stein, Hemingway (who gets the most space), Henry Miller, Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes] and how Paris became for each a complex image of the possibilities of metamorphosis.”

Many of their works

portray the experience of exile as a crisis in which the expatriate, opened to new desires in a seemingly unreal place, discovers internal contradictions and tensions. Paris thus figures as a fantastic scene of conflict and possibility, presenting those dilemmas of choice through which the self constructs and defines itself.

For Stein, “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” While she acknowledged that “anybody is as their land and air is,” meaning that some geographies originally form one’s personality and sensibilities, she saw other places such as Paris as “romantic other[s],” where “[Americans] are free not to be connected with anything happening.” More than that, Kennedy points out, Stein believed in a deep cultural conservatism—la vie française—as necessary for the individual’s “private revolt,” which might bring about aesthetic innovation.

In this “absolute interiority, Stein grounds her project [modernist writing] in a double rejection: a geographical flight from the country where she ‘belongs’ and an imaginative detachment from the ‘romantic’ country in which she lives.” (Stein lived in France for the last 43 years of her life—much of it at the famous atelier and salon at 27, rue de Fleurus, which became her own country—and is buried with Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise.)

Ernest Hemingway’s Paris was a different sort of romantic retreat, the “City of Danger,” as Kennedy titles the chapter on him. The safe enclave of Oak Park, Illinois, where Hemingway grew up among “the virtues of industry, piety, sobriety (Oak Park was dry before Prohibition), and rectitude,” never really found its way into Hemingway’s fiction. The Michigan woods where he spent summers as a boy and lived for a year before he was married provided richer experiences, “various initiations into adult pleasures and responsibilities,” which he was able to write about (later) extensively, and which he went looking for elsewhere all his life. This was what he found and thrived on in Paris.

Upon moving there, Hemingway was both drawn to and repulsed by what he saw. The flat he and his wife Hadley rented near the place de la Contrescarpe was above a little dancehall “with a motley clientele” in a quarter that “represented the cultural antithesis of Oak Park: an unpretentious lower-class milieu marked by joie de vivre and an easy acceptance of creaturely appetites, a place where people tolerated personal differences.” Hemingway was drawn to the vividness of that life, but he also “felt occasional disgust” with aspects of it, Kennedy says, “a residual moral disdain” of his mother’s religiosity, which he’d fled. Later he made himself intimately familiar with café life in Montparnasse, even when he wrote about its habitués, “The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde….”

Kennedy implies that the tension from Hemingway’s “combing” Paris for experience created the opportunity for “transition from the amateurish narratives he had been writing in Chicago to the disciplined, compressed prose” that “project[ed] a frenzied, cosmopolitan city of violent contrasts….”

Not the least of these contrasts might be between what Kennedy identifies as “writing and the distractions of the author’s private life.” The great world city with its multitude of diversions has been paradoxically for many “the town best organized for a writer to write that there is,” as Hemingway says, and this is Kennedy’s theme.

Henry Miller got to Paris a little late for the era of “easy expatriation,” and he was already middle-aged and without a published book. But the city provided the necessary break for him from “dominating women [in New York], past failures, and the American cult of wealth and success.” It also provided material and form for Tropic of Cancer, his first book. Though he struggled mightily with “the marginality and precariousness” of being broke in a foreign city that he called “a chimera,” Miller “nevertheless acquired a more intimate and extensive knowledge of the city than any other American writer,” which helped determine his identity.

Kennedy quotes Henry Miller quoting Jakob Wassermann:

Any landscape…which somehow becomes part of our destiny generates a definite rhythm within us, an emotional rhythm and a rhythm of thought of which we usually remain unconscious and which hence is all the more decisive. It should be possible to recognize from the cadences of a writer’s prose the landscape it covers as a fruit covers its kernel…. The landscape in which a person lives does not merely frame the picture; it enters into his very being and becomes a part of him…. Personality is engendered at the point where the inner and outer landscapes are contiguous, where the mythical and the permanent flow into limited time. And every literary work, every deed, every achievement is the result of an amalgamation of the tangible and the intangible, of the inner vision and the actual picture, of the idea and the factual situation, of conception and form.

Miller’s desperate experiment was to read himself by studying Paris “as I would a book.” What he finds in the “gaunt trees with their black boughs,” the “squalid districts [where]…the imbecilic dwarfs of Veláquez, the wretches and cripples of Fantin-Latour, the idiots of Chagall, the monsters created by Goya…pass now in review, brush up against one in filthy tatters,” and the tiny street “packed with the lowest dives where the Algerian and the Arabs get their hump,” is the ecstatic vision of a beauty so great it was “suffocating.” This “secret Paris,” as Kennedy calls it, is the site for Miller’s discovery of self and voice.

Though much of the last chapter of Kennedy’s book is on Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, the chapter also provides basic and illuminating context for “modernism as exile,” a condition we all still live with, complexified.

“[N]o previous modern age had ever brought such precipitous and sweeping change to everyday life and to human understanding,” Kennedy says, explaining the new technologies of communication, warfare, travel, and more. The culture that perceived this “cataclysm” had “a sense of living (and writing) on the threshold of a new era.” In a “great foreign city which remained ultimately elusive or inscrutable,” these American writers “portrayed the dilemma of the expatriate self” and their “accommodation[s] to the possibilities and risks of modernist displacement.”

The book is thoroughly enjoyable and accessible to a general readership. I can finally return it to the library now that I’ve fulfilled my desire to write about it, but I’ll have to buy my own copy for my permanent collection intersecting on Paris, the Lost Generation, modernism, World War I, and rock-star personalities of literature and the arts: Shakespeare & Company, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (and the collected Stein, including Paris, France), Moveable Feast, Being Geniuses Together; Women of the Left Bank, Americans in Paris, Exile’s Return and A Second Flowering, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation and others by Fitch, and many more. (I know I had a copy of Gisele Freund’s James Joyce in Paris but can’t find it. Now that really bothers me. Where the hell did it go? When was Crazy Larry in my house last? I hate it when people put books on their shelves that don't belong to them.)

Kennedy’s idea of Paris as a place that’s stimulating yet “lets you alone,” as Stein said, to do your work is a great metaphor for reading itself. Other people's writing is a foreign city I’ve built in my mind, book by book, and living in it has helped me imagine myself.

Mrs. Churm, on the prospect of my being called for campus interviews:

"I can’t believe you use that harsh deodorant soap on your face. You need to start using moisturizer."

Good advice, really....