Sunday, September 25, 2005
Peter Carey
I had wanted to read My Life as a Fake for a while, and then it turned up as a discount audiobook at Daedalus Books (I heartily recommend the Daedalus catalogue; I've even been to their store in Maryland, as part of the preparatory work on my wedding. No, really, we made a point of getting to the store and inviting one of the people there to the wedding. We also bought a lot of books, of course.).
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
Updike, Run
I'd managed to go a long time without reading Rabbit, Run. I hadn't been avoiding it, mind. I've enjoyed all of Updike's short fiction that I've read, and I've even taught "A&P," and I've enjoyed his poetry (although I don't think it's really first-rate), and I liked Memoirs of the Ford Administration more than I expected. But the book that put him on the map had fallen under my personal radar. Well, a lot of my current reading is aimed at filling in gaps like that.
The book is definitely an artifact of the Fifties. So much of the behavior and attitudes on which the story depends is tied to that post-Korea era, with memories of World War II still fresh, and the strains on and of family life being forced to the forefront of the American consciousness. But the heart of the book is in that strain, and the way it worked on some people not as freedom from the difficulties of the war years (two wars in rapid succession, after all; we think of WW II as long, but it was four and a half years, not long by current standards, and the time between the two wars was about as long as the war had been; one measure is that many men served in combat in both wars) but as a prison. For Rabbit Angstrom, family life and its expectations, and his own expectations, are a prison.
Of course, part of Rabbit's problem is that he hasn't yet grown up. He has no way of connecting with the world outside his own desires, no sense of what he wants for himself. He is, despite being a veteran and a father, unformed. Like so many American men then and since, he has no idea of how to be a grown-up on his own. All he knows is that the old rules no longer work. He has, pointedly, declined to join his father in the print shop. He's lighting out for the territories, but there is no frontier any more, and the unexplored lands are not in Pennsylvania -- they're in the unformed soul of Rabbit Angstrom.
It's hard to like Rabbit. He's a guy who twice runs out on women who are pregnant with his children, and though he does go back to one of them, he runs away from her twice more. He lacks ambition -- and I don't mean ambition in wanting to make a lot of money or to make a good career, but an ambition to define himself. Nonetheless, I did feel sorry for him, and felt the poignancy of his inability to commit to any kind of stability.
I suppose now I'll have to read the other books about him.
dmh
The book is definitely an artifact of the Fifties. So much of the behavior and attitudes on which the story depends is tied to that post-Korea era, with memories of World War II still fresh, and the strains on and of family life being forced to the forefront of the American consciousness. But the heart of the book is in that strain, and the way it worked on some people not as freedom from the difficulties of the war years (two wars in rapid succession, after all; we think of WW II as long, but it was four and a half years, not long by current standards, and the time between the two wars was about as long as the war had been; one measure is that many men served in combat in both wars) but as a prison. For Rabbit Angstrom, family life and its expectations, and his own expectations, are a prison.
Of course, part of Rabbit's problem is that he hasn't yet grown up. He has no way of connecting with the world outside his own desires, no sense of what he wants for himself. He is, despite being a veteran and a father, unformed. Like so many American men then and since, he has no idea of how to be a grown-up on his own. All he knows is that the old rules no longer work. He has, pointedly, declined to join his father in the print shop. He's lighting out for the territories, but there is no frontier any more, and the unexplored lands are not in Pennsylvania -- they're in the unformed soul of Rabbit Angstrom.
It's hard to like Rabbit. He's a guy who twice runs out on women who are pregnant with his children, and though he does go back to one of them, he runs away from her twice more. He lacks ambition -- and I don't mean ambition in wanting to make a lot of money or to make a good career, but an ambition to define himself. Nonetheless, I did feel sorry for him, and felt the poignancy of his inability to commit to any kind of stability.
I suppose now I'll have to read the other books about him.
dmh
