TS Eliot’s first thoughts on Nightwood

Posted on July 30, 2009 by laurenelkin

Alexander Chee pulled this out of the Faber archives and posted it on Twitter yesterday (I'm starting to think he's rooting around in my dissertation for inspiration!). It's TS Eliot's recommendation that Faber publish Nightwood.

Eliot sort of adopted Barnes, acting on her behalf to get the novel published, and contributing an introduction once it was. The theory of course being that if someone with as exalted taste as TS Eliot endorsed Barnes's book, it would appeal to a more general audience. And who knows– maybe it would improve his street cred, too, as the father of modernism struggled to stay relevant with the cognoscenti in the late 1930s. (Kind of like if James Wood wrote the introduction to a really far-out experimental prose-poem published by Salt or Soft Skull, to show he really isn't a curmudgeon about anything that isn't Flaubertian realism.)*

Of course, more recent feminist critics have scoffed at Eliot's introduction, reading it as a condescending attempt to legitimize or control this uncontrollable carnivalesque text. (Out of curiosity, I wonder what James Wood thinks of Nightwood? Now that would be an essay worth reading.) If this is the case, I'm sure it was not Eliot's intention to do so; rather, his idiom is so different from Barnes's that the introduction seems a little absurd, given the kind of language that follows. And Eliot seems to be aware of this: "When the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce." He then goes on to express his doubt that he has understood the novel– he says only that it took him "some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole," and that he believes it will appeal mainly to readers of poetry.

In my view, this is because the novel's language is at once so radical– just as Eliot himself was once perceived to be– and so deeply entrenched in the English literary tradition (not to mention the French and the German) that it calls for readers who are accustomed to truly paying attention to the language of what they are reading. To say of a novel that it deserves to be read by those who read poetry is, I think, high praise. ( Andrew Seal further considers this aspect of Eliot's introduction.)

If you have not read Nightwood, may I urge you to order it immediately from Powell's or the Book Depository?

*Not that he is. He loved Rifka Galchen, didn't he? & etc. I personally don't care if he is or isn't. And I do love TS Eliot– Prufrock, The Wasteland and the essays you have to read in grad school, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." And, of course, if you are familiar with these essays, then it makes perfect sense that Eliot would have appreciated Nightwood.

About

Posted on July 29, 2009 by laurenelkin

This blog, which I’ve been keeping regularly since the summer of 2004, is about Paris, and books, and art, and ideas– all of those things that shift your worldview just the slightest bit.

And, before you ask:

Maîtresse: n.f. 1. Personne qui enseigne qqch. 2. Femme avec laquelle un homme a des relations sexuelles en dehors du marriage. 3. Maîtresse femme: femme energetique, determinée.

COMMENTS POLICY

Your comments and criticism are welcome, as long as everyone plays nice. If you post anonymously, you run a real risk of having your comment deleted. I reserve all rights to delete offensive comments and, if necessary, block people from posting. It’s a blog, not the New York Times. This is not a democratic space and I do not pretend to impartiality.

ON THE ADVERTISING

For now I’m stuck with Typepad, and Typepad costs money. The ad revenue goes back into the blog, and what doesn’t generally goes into buying books, so it all works out in the end. Except those BlogHer ads are pretty fugly, aren’t they?

Bio

Posted on July 29, 2009 by laurenelkin

Lauren Elkin earned her PhD in English literature at the Université de Paris VII and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She specializes in women’s fiction, life-writing, and photography, and wrote her dissertation on Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Rosamund Lehmann. She graduated from Barnard College and holds masters degrees in French from the Sorbonne and in English from New York University.

Originally from New York, she moved to Paris in 2004. Her writing on books and culture has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, Five Dials, Bookforum, Bomb, The White Review, n+1 (forthcoming), The Quarterly Conversation, The Millions, and Upstairs at Duroc. She is the author of the novel DORSODURO (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson, forthcoming Jan/Feb2012), and is at work on novel number two, set in Paris in 1972 and the present day.

She is an adjunct professor at New York University in Paris.

All Towers Beautiful

Posted on July 28, 2009 by laurenelkin

Jill Jonnes, Eiffel's Tower (and the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count). Viking, 354 p., $27.95

Late in the first act of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” about the painting of Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday Afternoon the Island of La Grande Jatte, as they sit in the park on the eponymous island, Seurat’s mother says to her son: “What’s that? Off in the distance?” A tower, he tells her; they’re building it for the Exposition. It is the lead-in to a song. She sings, warily: “Changing/it keeps changing/I see towers/where there were trees…”

Going, all the stillness,
the solitude, Georgie!
Sundays disappearing, all the time . . .
When things were beautiful.

They are, of course, talking about the building of the Eiffel Tower. Never mind that Seurat’s painting had been finished by the time construction started on the tower in 1888; it is a soft moment at dusk between a mother and a son that shimmers with Sondheim’s watery half-step-whole-step motif, somewhat darkened by the minor key in which Seurat’s mother sings. The tower threatens, replacing the natural with the man-made, rendering the beautiful obsolete.

Jill Jonnes’s recently published history of the building of Eiffel’s Tower takes a different approach to the transformation of the Parisian skyline for the 1889 Exposition Universelle; it is the story of how Gustave Eiffel turned public favor from being dead-set against the building of the Tower to almost universally declaring it an enormous success. There are no minor notes here, only champagne and electric lights, not to mention Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, as Jonnes widens her lens beyond the tower itself to write a mini-history of Americans at the fair.

“While the year marked the centennial of the fall of the Bastille, the government preferred to highlight more noble sentiments: ‘We will show our sons what their fathers have accomplished in the space of a century through progress in knowledge, love of work and respect for liberty,’ proclaimed Georges Berger, the fair’s general manager (…) Eiffel’s tower was to be the world’s tallest structure, the thrusting symbol of republican France, visible from every direction, the perfect monument to preside over the rococo World’s Fair rapidly rising around its four latticed legs.” Jonnes draws together some of the more notable attendees at the fair– including Paul Gauguin, who went bananas for the Javanese dancers, Thomas Edison, who was showing off his new phonograph invention, which fairgoers lined up in droves to listen to in three-minute increments, and Annie Oakley, who blew the socks off the French with her sharp-shooting– as well as the notable non-attendees; given that the fair commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, most of Europe’s monarchies chose to boycott the Exposition. (Indeed, during the competition to select a monument to build for the fair, one of the proposed designs that lost to Eiffel’s tower was an enormous guillotine.)

Jonnes lingers perhaps a bit too long on William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his band of cowboys and Indians; one has the impression she’d have liked to write a whole book about them but conceded to include them in this one. And more could have been made of the contemporary threat posed by General Boulanger to the Third Republic; this would have allowed Jonnes to underline a bit more the nationalist, unifying role the Tower and the Exposition played for France, given that the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune of Paris were still fresh in recent memory.

Jonnes is at her best when she is acting as a sort of omniscient tour guide, taking us not only through the fairgrounds but behind the scenes (though her methodology remains unimpeachable; she does not surmise, nor does she invent, but stays close to the historical record). The most gripping part of the book, however, has to be the first half, which describes the coming into being of the tower, the idiosyncratic reasons invented by Parisians not to build it (as I quoted yesterday, one of the objections to the tower was that it would act like an enormous magnet, exerting its force to draw all the nails out of the neighboring Parisian buildings), the problems Eiffel ran into–for example, the trickiest part was not engineering the tower itself, but figuring out how to get elevators to run up and down that curvy iron body– and the Eiffel Tower-mania that took hold of le tout Paris once it was built. I for one was surprised to learn that all the Eiffel Tower kitsch being peddled to tourists in our era were all the rage with 1889's Parisians: “There were imaged executed in ‘pen, pencil, and brush, in photo and lithography… on handkerchiefs and caps; it was eaten in chocolate and marchpane; formed onto cigar cases and hand bells, inkstands, and candlesticks; it dangled from the gentleman’s watch chains and was fastened in the ladies ears.” Eiffel Tower earrings in the Belle Epoque? Nom de dieu!

Thoroughly researched (although the pop historian methodology of dropping in citations in quotation marks with only a shadow attribution in the form of a note in the appendix is occasionally disturbing), full of diverting anecdotes, and written in an accessible, appealing prose, Eiffel’s Tower is a highly readable story of a dazzling moment in French history. But that is not all it is; Jonnes also implicitly raises the question of the relationship between urban planning, the event, and national identity. It’s a particularly important question to consider, now, as the future of Paris hangs on whomever is chosen to design and execute Sarkozy’s dream of a “Grand Paris.” Those of us who love the city as is are of course resistant to anything that could transform our compact, low-buildinged Arcadia into something as monstrous and unmanageable as Tokyo (from where I write this review). But then, Seurat via Sondheim tells us not to be so afraid of change; he answers his mother:

All things are beautiful, Mother.
All trees, all towers, beautiful–
That tower beautiful, Mother.
See? A perfect tree.
Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother.
Pretty is what changes . . .
what the eye arranges
is what is beautiful!

Indeed, as Jonnes recounts, those who at first saw the tower as a monstrosity in time grudgingly conceded that it had its own very modern beauty. Jonnes quotes a contemporary eyewitness, the Vicomte de Vogüé:

There was in this iron mountain the elements of a new beauty, elements difficult to define, because no grammar of art had as yet supplied the formula, but evident to the most biased art critics. People admired its combination of lightness with power, the daring centering of the great arches, and the erect curves of the principal rafters, which…leap towards the clouds in a single bound. What [people] admired above all was the visible logic of this structure…logic translated into something visible…an abstract and algebraic beauty…LAstly, the spectators were won over by what inevitably conquers everyone a tenacious will, embodied in the success of a difficult undertaking.

Let’s hope we can say that much of whichever design for Le Grand Paris is chosen in November.

Dept of that’s not how magnets work

Posted on July 27, 2009 by laurenelkin

"By now, others had joined the campaign against Eiffel, asserting that the actual construction of a safe one-thousand-foot tower was technically impossible, as no building that tall could resist the power of the wind. Moreover, how would Eiffel find men willing or even able to work at such vertiginous heights? And what of the danger to those who would come as visitors to ascend such a structure? Of course, Eiffel knew that these naysayers probably understood nothing of his vast experience, the more than fifty wrought-iron railroad bridges he had built in France alone. Erecting those structures had made him thoroughly confident that his mathematical formula for shaping wrought iron would hold up to the worst possible winds. As for the labor question, his workers who had built the bridge at Garabit were already habituated to working four hundred feet above the ground. And once the tower was up, he had no doubt it would be perfectly safe. He did not bother to dignify with a reply the strange assertion that such a huge iron tower would become a dangerous magnet, drawing the nails from surrounding Parisian buildings."

–Jill Jonnes, Eiffel's Tower (and the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count)

Fighting over A Moveable Feast

Posted on July 27, 2009 by laurenelkin

What a lot of sound and fury about this new "restored" version of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast! After A.E. Hotchner's New York Times Op-Ed attack,Thomas Lipscomb wades in with his own attack, although he makes a show of trying to untangle fact from fiction (the lone commenter begs to differ with Lipscomb's version). Brenda Wineapple has the fairest assessment I've seen, at the Wall Street Journal.

I haven't seen the restored edition, but am curious to do so (though I doubt I'll be able to find a copy before the fall). However, like Thomas Gagen at the Boston Globe, I'd urge those who are coming to it for the first time to stick to the classic 1964 edition, and to treat this restored one as the equivalent of the bonus material on a DVD.

Happy trails, Happy Ending

Posted on July 24, 2009 by laurenelkin

As I mentioned, while I was in New York I went to some interesting readings– readings that were radically different from any kind of readings I usually go to in Paris (though that is changing). On one of my last nights in New York, however, I went to the Happy Ending Reading & Music Series at Joe's Pub, and wow.

I can't find the link right now, but I remember reading something not so long ago written by a writer on his book tour wondering why on earth we take part in the strange ritual that is a bookstore reading. Why force writers to schlep from bookstore to bookstore to read the same passages over and over to an audience of maybe 5 people, none of whom will buy the book? But the Happy Ending readings take readings to another level. It's reading as entertainment, is what it is.

Started by the writer and performer Amanda Stern in 2003 out of the Happy Ending bar in Chinatown, since January of this year it's been held the first Wednesday of every month at Joe's Pub. Every installment features three writers and a musician; each is asked to take a public risk of some sort, to put themselves on the line doing something they've either never done, never done in public, or are reticent to do again. Past evenings have seen Felicia Sullivan demonstrating a complicated yoga pose; Rick Moody singing a cappella; Audrey Niffengger reading a stranger's tarot cards; and Ben Greenman reading aloud his pin codes and credit card numbers. As for the musicians, their risk is to get the audience to sing along to the cover song of their choice. Stern, meanwhile, acts as MC, while the audience downs drinks and hamburgers in between moments of rapt attention.

This past month's installment–themed "Confessions & Jealousy" brought the musician Elvis Perkins (a lovely combination of Johnny Cash, Jeff Buckley, and I don't know what) together with Nick Laird, Kevin Canty, and Binnie Kirshenbaum– who dared, in an act of personal liberation from a lifetime of acquiescence, to refuse the risk, thus risking our dislike! but we did not feel dislike, only disappointment at not getting to see another offbeat trick. Nick Laird, on the other hand, took an adorable risk: Mr. Zadie Smith brought along their pug , Maud, to whom he read a pair of sonnets he had written about her. Maud begged for treats, occasionally barking and interrupting Laird. It went a little like this: "When you're overexcited you tend to get hiccups/But your weapon of choice is the sneeze." Punctuated, periodically with commands: "Sit, Maudie, sit! Down, Maudie!" Afterwards, he read from his new novel, the name of which he forgot to tell us (but which Zadie herself shouted from backstage: "Glover's Mistake!"). [The Village Voice has a fuller write-up of Laird, Maud, and the new novel, here.]

Kevin Canty read a staccato text from his short story collection Where the Money Went. And for his risk, he read it backwards. (The last paragraph, that is.) Binnie Kirshenbaum, when not subverting the Sterntriarchy and refusing her risk, read from her new novel, The Scenic Route (which sounds wonderful, judging from the excerpt).

And then Elvis Perkins came back around to carry out his risk of the evening. After warming up the audience's vocal chords with a test run, he asked us to contribute some gospel-style ooohs and ahhhs while he sang a cover of Alan Lomax's "Sweet Roseanna." "Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye," he sang. "Ooooohh, ooohh, ooohh," about five of us replied. It was a perfectly mellow, perfectly harmonious finish (though nothing like a happy ending) to an evening rife with confessions and crackling with jealousy. At least on my part, that I no longer live in New York and can no longer spend one Wednesday a month with Amanda and her motley crew of storytellers and risktakers.

The 21st century malls of Tokyo

Posted on July 22, 2009 by laurenelkin

After Roppongi Hills, now let's stroll over to Tokyo Midtown. [Or Tokyo Mid-u-town, as they say here]

You could start with a cup of coffee at Dean & Deluca

Or you could check out Neyn, which, according to their website, is a "donut shop inspired by European confectioners." Or–

OMG!–

–you could go to Sky! Sky is here! Honto? But what is Sky?

I never found out. So, you could console yourself by buying an individually-wrapped banana

Or you could go watch the cooking classes, and, like N, sigh over the cruel fate that made you neither Japanese nor a woman nor a housewife, and therefore incapable of taking the Tokyo Midtown cooking classes.