I've Been Reading Lately: June 2022
A monthly look at what I've been reading, including looks at Nabokov, a Sontag biography, a debut collection of stories and more
Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work - Benjamin Moser (Ecco, 2019)
Equally fascinating and frustrating, Benjamin Moser’s biography of Sontag is the result of years of work, scores of interviews and lots and lots of time sitting and reading. He’s read all her books and essays, even the ones that weren’t published, and he occasionally steps across the line from biographer to literary critic, remarking on what made her work so special- or, more and more towards the end, ring hollow.
Indeed, Moser seems sometimes like he grew tired of Sontag, or at least tired of “Susan Sontag”, the public intellectual. She was nasty, mean-spirited and abusive towards lovers and friends. She was also whip-smart, a polymath and deeply insecure, constantly pushing herself harder and harder.
The writer and thinker that emerges from these pages is an interestingly flawed person: a bisexual who couldn’t admit it in public, a writer who mixed original thought with occasional plagiarism, someone who was arguably one of the most important thinkers of the last half of the 20th century, but found herself lacking. By mixing excerpts from her journals with the published writing, Moser is able to show the dichotomy between her publish, almost overly confident publish self and her insecure, almost pitiful private one.
There are occasionally nitpicks. References are brought up but never explained, thinkers are cited as major influences on her and but never shown exactly how. I’m less worried about Moser’s attitude towards Sontag- I appreciated this was not hagiography- than I am at it’s apparent length and what feels like some particularly nasty edits. Still, even though it’s well over 700 pages (the endnotes and index are novella length!), the book never overstayed its welcome and I found myself returning often over the past week.
Maybe don’t read it in tandem with her essays, but make sure you have at least one collection of them close by- if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to dive into them as soon as you’re finished.
The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International, 1965/1990)
A minor Nabokov, a book about identity and exile life in Berlin, told in a sprightly, almost tweed-endowed prose style. Where I didn’t find the plot too engaging, I found the way he wrote interesting. But that’s Vladimir for ya. He sort of plays games with the reader - leaving you wondering who Smurov is, why nobody sees him and what exactly his relationship to the narrator is. As he put it himself in the introduction, “The theme of The Eye is the pursuit of an investigation which leads the protagonist through a hall of mirrors and ends in the merging of twin images.” I don’t know. I like the way Nabokov writes, even in a minor work like this - it runs barely 100 pages, even in a large typeface - but this one didn’t grab me the way Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or the best of his stories did. Your mileage may vary.
Nowadays and Lonelier - Carmella Gray-Cosgrove (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021)
A compelling set of stories, Nowadays and Lonelier shows Carmella Gray-Cosgrove as a new and distinctive voice in Canadian letters. Her stories follow people who are going through moments of epiphany- they’re suddenly in over their head or realizing a way out or just trying to make it through another day when something happens. Frequently they deal with addicts, a topic Gray-Cosgrove handles delicately: they’re not heroized or demonized, just treated like people. And indeed, throughout this book I felt that Gray-Cosgrove has a lot of sympathy for her characters, a lot of heart. I quite enjoyed this one - she’s one to watch.
On Being Blue - William H Gass (NYRB Classics 1976/2014)
Blue, blue, electric blue, that’s the colour of my room, as Bowie said, and I read this one in one sitting, on a blue chair and in blue pants on a day when the sky was blue and my mood was too, a rumination on all the meanings of blue and what it stands for - blue notes on turntable, blue words on the page, working blue on the stage - and it’s meanings in mid century America, a country that although Gas’s never mentions it, prides itself on the blue and the thin blue line, layers unfolding in a way green and red and even mauve never quite get across (a record label called Green Note? Get out of here), indeed, in Gass’s hands, blue becomes erotic, it becomes insight, it becomes poetry and it becomes art - and that, most of all, my friends, is even harder than being green.
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight Macdonald (NYRB Classics, 2011)
A good collection, if a little brief, of Macdonald’s essays. He was a good critic and journalist, and while his other books are hard to find (they’re worth tracking down), and this collection offers a couple of of his deeper essays- Midcult and Masscult, a shot across the bow at middlebrow literature, and Triumph of the Fact, an essay on American tastes for hard data and quick information that’s as relevant now with Twitter and Tiktok as it was over five decades ago.
Macdonald occasionally had a temper, and his attack on James Cozzens’s long forgotten novels shows their age a little bit, and maybe his takedown of Hemingway is a display of bullying that would make Hitchens blush. But credit where it’s due: book reviews age about as well as the paper they’re printed on, and not many of his peers still have their work in print, let alone have any relevance in 2022 - I’m looking at you, Trilling.
All in all, a welcome collection and one I’m glad to have. I wish more of his work was in print, but until some enterprising publisher puts out a Collected Works (Library of America? Everyman’s Library?) this will have to do.