The language of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mister Lytle: An Essay” could have been a response to Wednesday night’s prompt. “…with rags cut from an undershirt [I] worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life…[the old man’s] fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes.” These are gorgeous sentences and imagery, violently so, words of passionate worship. And, in confessing, “The South . . . I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can.” Sullivan is not unlike Joan Didion, the west- coast-girl in “Goodbye to All That” debarking the plane, violently drawn by the glamor of New York City. The draw of the agrarian southern writer Andrew Lytle on Sullivan is more complex, though.
Andrew Nelson LytleLytle’s bigotry, could be blamed on a terrible age of racism, anti-Semitism, like Susan Griffin writing of her grandfather’s similarly wicked tongue, an old man unknowingly the likely descendent of a Jew, and yet, Griffin speaks of loving the smell of his cigar. Both writers seem to be saying that we can’t help but own these affections, in spite of our moral selves. Does the insular culture of southern white men writing to and for one another excuse a cruel and bitter tongue? Maybe not excuse, Sullivan suggests, but simply allow that it’s beyond the time to change—beyond regret—except when a beloved sister is injured in the struggle. So, no, it’s not too late; the old man is changed, remorseful for at least some of his hardheartedness, if only for that one moment.
The “perfect” sentence that Sullivan discovered beneath the typewriter dust cover suggests that what makes a writer of literature, rather than a reporter of bare fact, is an almost psychotic love of language, of syntax and rhythm.
Sullivan’s account of bathing the ninety-two year old man, his skin “translucent” in the face, “doughy” on the body, and its hairlessness; exudes authenticity. It takes me to the place where I store the sweet spirit of my grandmother, who rose above her state of abject dependence, lifting her granddaughters through the experience of her bathing with a rescued dignity. It is, after all, Sullivan’s journey that I’m interested in, not the old confederate, except for the innate horror of growing that old and vulnerable, no matter how brilliant or gifted one is. (Surely, when I was young the thought of a long life sounded comforting, but the closer I get, the more daunting the prospect.) I am, instead, compelled by the young writer’s choices, by his admission of inadequacy as he looked on those perfectly interlaced words tapped out by a man whose mind often slipped in an out of lucidity.
The same connection isn’t available in Joan Schenkar’s piece on Theodora Roosevelt Keogh, because we barely meet the writer in the telling. While it is fun to read rumor corrections (nibbled earlobe, not bit-off ear) and get a taste of Keogh’s fascinating characters, plot lines, and sensual subject matter, it reads like a promotional write-up designed to accompany and encourage a renewed interest in the novels. “I loved Theodora dearly, admired her tremendously, and could never bring myself to record her.” Perhaps the withholding of Schenkar’s reason behind this choice is illustrative enough. An opportunity to preserve Keogh and an opportunity to share—how the six year phone relationship changed Schenkar as a person, a woman, a writer—is missed.
Katie Roiphe’s piece on Janet Malcolm comes to life in the iconic New Yorker writer’s emailed retorts and dodges. “If I had said these things about my living room (“somehow perfect and comfortable”) I would have sounded conceited and complacent. The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.” Malcolm is the master humbling the supplicant, who sits in the guise of an interviewer. But it is also the very road I walk that Malcolm is referring to: autobiographical writing, memoir, which the extended history of my project, I hope, deflates of its pretension. And I, too, grew up in a family of interrupters; stories had to be told efficiently in the public arena. In fact, that helps to explain why it drove me crazy when my then husband would begin at the very beginning (almost the dawn of creation) to tell simple funny story, and I’m not sure how gracefully I interrupted him, at times. Our children, on the other hand, when asked to relate an experience, tend to tell an abbreviated tale.
I was struck by how Roiphe's inquiries into the “brutal frankness” of a male fiction professor and the chauvinistic academic environment yielded an almost candid response from Malcolm. “Showing off to straight men remained a delight and necessity to women of my generation. Those of us who wrote, wrote for men and showed off to them. Our writing had a certain note. I’m not sure I can describe it, but I can hear it.” I am reminded of an earlier moment in our class this semester—the “male brain” writing and reading preferences “murky” water that we waded into and then quickly swam for shore. Malcolm is getting at that here and it makes me wonder why it is such a taboo topic. I mean, if a certain way of thinking, most often associated with men (perhaps explained by the biology of the most commonly male brain type, which is limited in its connections, dendrite and corpus callosum, right brain to left brain as compared with the complex mesh of connections in what is most often the female brain type), is stark and unfiltered by inconvenient contradiction—god-like in its self-assurance. I find it fascinating that Malcolm added with regard to female writers of her era who achieved respected status, “The aggression [in their writing] is coupled with flirtation.” And then she closed down the topic. Honestly, I find the failure to talk about male and female dynamics and differences to be a new form of victimization in which select subjects dare not be broached.
Janet Malcolm book signing 12/12/07: Two Lives a biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
When Malcolm writes that it didn’t matter how subtle a reporter’s approach to an interview was, because the same truths emerged, my response was immediate: it is not the facts but the insightful interpretation of the facts that provides an interesting read and mastery of the beauty of language that makes for great writing.
When Malcolm writes that it didn’t matter how subtle a reporter’s approach to an interview was, because the same truths emerged, my response was immediate: it is not the facts but the insightful interpretation of the facts that provides an interesting read and mastery of the beauty of language that makes for great writing.
Finally, all of this profiling of prominent writers is, I suspect, really only deeply intriguing to me because I crave the title “writer” before, after, above, or under my name (or my pseudonym). Writers are an industry unto ourselves, it seems.
