Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (11 page)

Enough of that. You ask what I make of Edward Said, your old teacher, on the subject of late style. I confess I don’t remember much of what he has to say, except that I found myself adhering stubbornly to the old-fashioned understanding of late style that he was engaged in attacking. In the case of literature, late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death. Of course once you get beyond that starting point the writing itself takes over and leads you where it will. What you end up with may be anything but simple, anything but subdued.

In your last letter you go through a roll call of postwar American poets, poets who made their mark after 1945, and really it is a very distinguished list. Do we see their like today? I suppose I should be cautious about coming out with too quick a reply: the old are notoriously blind to the virtues of the young. But I will say that among today’s readers I see very few who take their lead in life from what the poets of our day are saying. Whereas I do believe that in the 1960s and, up to a point, the 1970s a lot of young people—indeed, many of the best young people—took poetry as the truest guide to living there was. I am referring here to young people in the United States, but the same held for Europe—in fact, most strongly of all for Eastern Europe. Who today has the power to shape young souls that Brodsky or Herbert or Enzensberger or (in a more dubious way) Allen Ginsberg had?

Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life. I am quite prepared to give heed to diagnoses of what happened between then and now that have a political or economic or even world-historical character; but I do nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure.

All the best,

John

October 23, 2009

Dear John,

Just to cheer you up for a moment (if cheer is the proper word to use in this context). The other night, I participated in a PEN-sponsored event called “Reckoning with Torture,” which documented the abuses of the U.S. government under Bush (cover page of the program is enclosed), and in his opening remarks, Anthony Appiah, the new president of American PEN, cited a passage from
Diary of a Bad Year
—the one about Sibelius and Guantánamo, about pride in humanity and shame in humanity—and it made me glad (if glad is the proper word to use in this context) to know that you were among us that night and to be given proof that people exist out there who are fully engaged in your work—as opposed, say, to the English woman whose letter so deeply and justifiably upset you.

•

Forgive me for being so slow in answering your last fax—dated nine days ago. The truth is that I have been struggling to say something pertinent in response to your remark about the arts playing a diminished role in our inner life since the late seventies or early eighties. I have filled several pages with my rants and opinions, but they don’t satisfy me. I find them shallow and boring, and I hesitate to inflict them on you. Also: the more I have pondered the question, the more depressed I have become—overwhelmed by a feeling that I have been writing an obituary of my own time, my own life.

Some of the approaches I have attempted are: 1) an analysis of capitalism triumphant; 2) the victory of pop culture over “high” culture; 3) the collapse of Communism, and with it the collapse of revolutionary idealism, the notion that society can be reinvented; 4) the death of modernism.

Answers might be found in exploring these subjects, but all I have found is sadness.

But you are right. Something is gone now that used to be there. I don’t know if artists themselves are to be blamed for this loss. There are probably too many factors involved to blame anyone in particular. One thing is certain, however: stupidity has increased on all fronts. If one reads the letters of soldiers from the American Civil War, many of them turn out to be more literate, more articulate, more sensitive to the nuances of language than the writing of most English professors today. Bad schools? Bad governments that allow bad schools to exist? Or simply too many distractions, too many neon lights, too many computer screens, too much noise?

My only consolation is that art forges on, in spite of everything. It is an unquenchable human need, and even in these grim times, there are countless numbers of good writers and artists, even great writers and artists, and even if the audience for their work has grown smaller, there are still enough people who care about art and literature to make the pursuit worthwhile.

I’m sorry to have given you so little today. I am in a funk. I will do better next time, I promise.

With great affection,

Paul

November 2, 2009

Dear Paul,

May I return briefly to our discussion of sport?

I’ve been reading a book about the history of quantification,
Trust in Numbers
by Theodore M. Porter (1995). Porter is concerned to show that our passion for the figures in “facts and figures” is of fairly recent origin: he dates the stirrings of the quantificatory spirit to the mid–eighteenth century

It occurs to me that the rise of mass sports and the cult of numbers may be not unconnected; in other words, that there may be a reason why sports are delivered to us nowadays in numerical packaging.

Take the various football codes as an example. As far as I know, the progenitor of football, in Europe, was an annual tussle between the young men of neighboring villages to secure a nominated trophy and bring it home. The form of the trophy didn’t really matter. It may once have been a head, human or animal, but usually it was a bladder or ball. There were very few rules (“teams” were of any size, the field was the whole countryside, the competition was in running and/or blocking and/or wrestling, probably in eye-gouging too), and the game ended when, in effect, the first goal was scored.

It was only in the mid–nineteenth century that rules of such contests were codified to make it a proper game. It was with this codification that the game began to take on its present numerical cast: number of players, size and marking of field, length of game, criteria for goal scoring, definition of victory, etc.

Or consider bat-and-ball games. I take these to have their origin in a form of play in which one man hurls stones at another man, who defends himself with a shield or stick. This play becomes less dangerous when the target is redefined (in cricket) as an object which the man with the stick defends, and further redefined (in baseball) as an abstract torso-sized target more or less behind the man with the stick. What the reformers do with the resulting game is to add a heavy numerical overlay—distance between the two men, size and composition of “ball” (stone), size of “bat” (stick), etc.—and then to superadd a whole new system of abstract numerical rewards for hitting the ball (runs) and penalties for quitting your “at bat” post, etc.

It is only once the primitive contests have been thus reconceived as rule-governed recreations, and victory has been given an abstract, numerical definition, that they are welcomed into modern life.

Boxing is an interesting case. It remains the closest in spirit to the primitive contest. Though the quantifiers have done their best to modernize it (awarding points for blows, for example, at least in the amateur code), it remains only partly tamed, and thus hovers somewhat on the fringes of polite sport.

It further occurs to me that a certain kind of male child is drawn to sports like baseball and cricket because they combine the hero worship common to all sport (“I wish my father were like X!” with the variant “The man who calls himself my father is not my real father; my real father is X”) with the socially sanctioned systems of quantification that allow quick but immature minds to evade difficult questions like, “Are the men who call themselves Team A better than the men who call themselves Team B?” or “Is there a way in which the communal virtue of Team A may exceed the sum of the virtues of its individual members?”

These reflections were sparked by reading the interview you recently gave Kevin Rabalais (it appeared in last weekend’s
Australian
newspaper), which included a cautionary tale of what can happen to a boy who doesn’t take care to have his pencil ready at all times.

Thanks for your letter of October 23. I can offer no better an answer than you to the question of why artists were important to our lives fifty years ago but are no longer so.

As regards your sense that you are and perhaps have for a while been writing an obituary of your own times and your own life, let me mention that I recently heard about a burgeoning field in terminal care: the dying person is assisted by a professionally trained counselor to record their reflections on their own life—achievements, regrets, reminiscences, the works—which are then tastefully packaged (CD, bound printout) and passed on to the surviving family. It has been shown, said the promoter of the concept, that having a chance to tell their story in this way enables patients to die more peacefully.

All the best,

John

November 13, 2009

Dear John,

The day after sending off my last letter to you, I received the manuscript of the English-language translation of a novel written by a friend of mine—a great mountain of a book, three or four times longer than anything either one of us has ever written. The translator is someone new to him (his previous translator has retired), and because my friend considers this to be his most important book (it is), and because his grasp of English is shaky, I offered some months ago to read the translation and give comments to his American editor. I finished the job yesterday—a slow, painstaking slog through thousands and thousands of sentences, puzzled from beginning to end by the translator’s numerous errors, slowly coming to the conclusion (not yet confirmed) that English is not her first language. The mistakes are mostly small ones—“like” for “as if,” “me and him” for “he and I,” split infinitives, adjectives used as adverbs, and a maddening confusion between transitive and intransitive verbs—but the cumulative effect is jarring, making the book unpublishable as it stands now. Corrections will be made, of course, everything will come out right in the end, but all through my labors I kept thinking back to our discussion several months ago about the notion of a “mother tongue” and how truly complex a business it is to master a language, how many rules and principles and exceptions to rules and principles must be absorbed into one’s bloodstream to be able to “own” a particular idiom. The slightest misstep reveals a failure to understand how the system works. A single flub, and alarm bells start ringing. Not unlike what happened to me the other day when I called our local car service for a ride into Manhattan. I gave the female dispatcher the address, which she must have looked up on a computer map, and then she asked me if it was between such-and-such street and Houston Street (pronouncing it Hewston, like the city in Texas). Everyone who lives in New York knows that it is pronounced Howston—and I immediately said to her: “You’re not from New York, are you?” and she said no, she had in fact just moved here. It reminded me of certain scenes in war movies, spy movies, in which a German posing as an American or an American posing as a German gives himself away with a small slip like that—saying Hewston instead of Howston and thus exposing himself as an impostor. The firing squad comes next. A whole battalion is slaughtered. The war is lost. How intricate the knowledge of a mother tongue, how subtle its workings!

•

Your insight into the Enlightenment’s mania for quantification and the development of organized sports is ingenious. I don’t know how familiar you are with baseball, but given the time you have spent in America, you must have at least a passing acquaintance with it. As you are probably aware, it is a sport dominated by numbers. Every play, every action within a play is immediately transformed into a statistic, and since those statistics are kept on file, every action that takes place in a game today is read in the context of the entire history of the sport. Few Americans can remember who the president was in 1927, but anyone who follows baseball will be able to tell you that 1927 was the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. To give you a taste of this almost Talmudic obsession with numbers, I enclose a photocopy of a page from
The Baseball Encyclopedia
which, among other things, includes the career record of every player who has participated in even a single game since the sport was invented. Note that Paddy Mayes’s entire career consisted of just five games, all in 1911, whereas Willie Mays, the legendary Willie Mays (he of the absent pencil story), played from 1951 to 1973 and appeared in 2,992 games. Quantification indeed. To the uninitiated, these charts will look like utter nonsense.

•

You mention that the rules of football were codified in the mid–nineteenth century. While researching my little piece on soccer/football more than ten years ago, I found out that standard rules were introduced as early as 1801—even closer to the mid–eighteenth century and the birth of the “quantificatory spirit,” thus making it possible for Napoleon to have been defeated “on the playing fields of Eton.” But you are right about the
present-day
rules of football, which were drawn up at Cambridge University in 1863.

As for bat-and-ball games, I stumbled across this theory about the origins of cricket: knocking down three-legged milkmaid stools with a thrown object (stone? ball?) and then, as time went on, to make the game more challenging, the introduction of a stick to prevent the object from hitting the stool. The three legs of the stool eventually became the wicket. Plausible? Perhaps.