Author: stevensonale

It’s a list that’s ever-growing. I’m starting it near the end of a year, but so be it.

NonFiction

• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day – Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
• 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die – James Mustich

Such might have been an intriguing topic for a doctoral thesis, had I written one, and had I discovered “Wolf Solent” in earlier times. So many oddities exist in this book, and so much of it reminds me of my mother. From her I inherited my preference for the inanimate over people, as both a conduit and a touchstone for the past, for nostalgia. From her I derived my extreme distaste for the personal, the prosaic, and for the coarseness of materialism. All of these tendencies are basic to “Wolf Solent.”

Powys’ mystical view of nature has me in its grip. This book might be my new touchstone for identifying kindred souls.

 
Advancing up this lane hand in hand with his companion, Wolf felt his soul invaded by that peculiar kind of melancholy which emanates, at the end of a spring day, from all the elements of earth and water. It is a sadness unlike all others, and has perhaps some mysterious connection with the swift, sudden recognition, by myriads and myriads of growing things, of the strange fatality that pursues all earthly life, whether clothed in flesh or clothed in vegetable fibre. It is a sadness accentuated by grey skies, grey water, and grey horizons; but it does not seem to attain its most significant meaning until the pressure of the spring adds to these elemental wraiths the intense wistfulness of young new life. (p. 94, Vintage paperback edition)
 

This strange book by John Cowper Powys has already enhanced my vocabulary, even though I’m only on p. 47. So far I’ve encountered

• palimpsest
• unction
• squinnied
• vellum
• sacerdotal
• gonfalon
• captious

Powys seems to positively revel in the use of obscure language, as evidenced in the following rather extraordinary passage:

 
Mr. Urquhart smiled and leant back in his chair. He drained his wine-cup to the dregs, and with half-shut, malignant eyes, full of a strange inward unction, he squinnied at his interlocutor. The lines of his face, as he sat there contemplating his imaginary History, took to themselves the emphatic dignity of a picture by Holbein. The parchment-like skin stretched itself tightly and firmly round the bony structure of the cheeks, as though it had been vellum over a mysterious folio. A veil of almost sacerdotal cunning hovered, like a drooping gonfalon, over the man’s heavy eyelids and the loose wrinkles that gathered beneath his eyes. (p. 46)
 

I’ve been listening to David Sedaris’ new book, Theft by Finding, a collection of journal entries beginning in the late 70s. We are roughly contemporaries, and Sedaris’ early adulthood resonated with me for its itinerancy, lack of direction, experience living in urban locales, and variety of odd jobs. It differed insofar as Sedaris, butterfly-like, emerged from his cocoon of indecision and chose a direction, polishing his writing early on. We are of course, different in many other ways as well. Sedaris came out as gay, was a heavy drug user (or claimed to be), and was, and is, of course, extremely funny. I am only occasionally funny.

Sedaris is a model of how one can write about literally anything and make it entertaining. He talked early on about his choice of subject matter, saying he would resort to the weather if no other topics presented themselves, but his writing is amazingly fecund, and it didn’t seem that he ever lacked for subject matter, and certainly never had to resort to meteorological events as a last resort. While all of Sedaris’ writing posits him as primarily an observer in the world, it is not rich in introspection; the majority of the writing, then as now, involves Sedaris’ reactions to other people, a cast of characters with some permanent players: i.e., his mother and father, sisters Lisa, Tiffany, Amy, brother Paul, and, later, his boyfriend Hugh; and the constantly shifting array of new faces that pop up for short-term guest appearances. I often wondered whether people actually said the things that Sedaris quoted them as saying; so many of the quotes seemed impossibly droll, or maybe it was Sedaris’ delivery (at the forefront on audiobook) that made them seem so.

Given the mundaneness of so many of Sedaris’ topics, I wondered why they were so humorous. I arrived at the following reasons:

• Concision – Sedaris’ writing is incredibly economical, and all of it goes toward the main idea.
• Creation of a unique world – Reading the writer’s world, one is sucked into a world view that informs all aspects of the writing. But it is not the predictable world of the middle-aged gay man. While the preoccupations are not uncharacteristic of such a person, in their details they are uniquely Sedarian.
• Lack of hyperbole – While the writing can be screamingly funny, nothing about it cries for attention. In fact, Sedaris seems to work hard at tamping down the antic, instead aiming for an understated effect, that amuses through surprise.
• Observation – Sedaris’ gift for observation is second to none. Having apparently spent large swaths of his life alone, or at least in some sense aloof from close contact with others, Sedaris has perfected the role of observer, capturing every tic and accent of his players, and recording them in his notebooks.
• Freedom from need – Sedaris writes from a position of almost complete emotional autonomy. This perfectly complements his observational skills, which are generally only used in the service of accuracy, not as vehicles for longing. The subject qua subject is the thing, not the ways in which it benefits or moves him. If the latter does occur, there is yet another layer of ironic distancing involved.

In the way it reveals a less than organic structure, Philip Roth’s early novel has some of the marks of a formative effort, but it is all in all, as James Atlas proclaims on the cover of my Vintage paperback edition, “A first novel of awesome maturity.”

In youth I’ve shared the following feelings expressed by Roth’s Gabe Wallach (and the mention of Holland as described in children’s books reminds me of the passage I read every December in our family’s red-backed anthology of Christmas writing):

 
At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. … Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever. (p. 230)
 

 
But Roth is a realist. A few paragraphs later, humbled by a mis-dialed phone number (meant to show that, while he thinks of Martha, he longs for Libby), he provides the coda:

 
The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on. (p. 231)