March 2022: The Free World (Louis Menand), Men without Women (Murakami), Bruce Duffy (The World as I Found It), and Chekhov plays

March 2022: Menand, Murakami, Duffy and Chekhov 

There’s much to admire and like in Louis Menand’s monumental work, The Free World (2021) - and some annoyances as well. I have to agree with friend Frank K that it’s great to imagine, while reading this book, that Menand is your perfect dinner guest, entertaining all at some length with this account of the lives, contributions, and ideas of among the most famous or notorious thinks of the post-Cold War I (as I now would call it) era. He covers a lot of ground with the 20 (I think) chapters, including literature, music, advertising, photography, fashion, art, student protests, theVietnam War, and I could go on. This book feels like a omnium gatherun, with most  of the pieces, I think, reworking of various magazine articles, esp in the NYer where LM is a staffer (in addition to his day job at Harvard). The problem such as it is w/ this book is that there’s no over-riding theme, nothing to hold the 20 chapters together, no conclusion in fact - the book just ends (with a whimper). So, skim away, and, for that matter, you can probably read the chapters in any order over any length of time! A few of the chapters that interested me the least I just skimmed through, but those that I cared more about - the literary topics esp - I read carefully, even all the footnotes, which are universally amusing; as to the index, LM is a genius at annotation, with practically every sentence in this 700+-pager backed by a citation. Nice work! This may be my own shortcoming, but I was most attentive the the chapters about which I was already well informed - less so about those that would have brought me new insight of inspiration. That said, I enjoyed his take on Kerouac and the Beats, on Ginsberg, on the Beatles … and others who shaped our world and our consciousness (though why hardly a mention of Dylan?). Wished I could have understood more about structuralism and deconstruction - LM is not great at finding illustrative examples of different styles of literary criticism, and he goes light on some of the critics whose star rose and has fallen: Northrup Frye and his attempt to build an anatomy of criticism, foolish and restrictive; Paul de Man, whose deconstructionist ideas indicated that a “text” doesn’t mean what it says (how convenient for a critic who in his youth spouted Nazi propaganda and ideology).  As Frank K anticipated, I particularly liked his take on the “new Criticism” and its link to conservative and even racist thought - an oppressive and short-sided dicta from on high as to how a poem should be properly read. Good riddance to that! Examples would have been good, however. Anyway, the field is so much more open and engaged than it was 20 years ago. The prose cane dense at times - but the essence is always there, and one can only guess that LM is an incredibly accessible and inspiring teacher. 

I read Haruki Murakami’s story collection Men Without Women (2014) primarily to see how it was adapted and developed into the film Drive My Car. Here are some notes: First, the only 2 characters in the story by that name are the director and his driver; the entire story consists of conversations between these 2. Both are closely modeled on the published story. Unlike the story, the director meets the driver right away (he needs a driver because he’s been diagnosed with a near blindness in one eye; that’s retained in the movie, but it’s not the primary reason why he needs a driver). The director is very particular about his driver, but less recalcitrant  than the director in the movie. Though at one point the driver tells the director of her difficult childhood, there’s no journey to Hokkaido to visit her childhood village; hence, their relationship is not nearly as profound as in the film. Curiously, the film adaptation also extended to 2 other stories in the collection: Scheherazade and to a lesser extent, Kino. In Sch., the main character (who seems to be in some kind of witness-protection program) has an ongoing sexual relationship w/ a woman who tells him a story after each time they have sex (see, Arabian nights), and the longest story she narrates is similar to the one that the driver’s wife tells him after they have sex in the opening scene of the film. The film cleverly entwines the two story lines, with the unfaithful wife being narrator of the child breaks into house of school-yard crush. (The third element, much more brief, is of a man returning home unexpectedly to find his wife having sex with another.) What’s not adapted from any part of Mw/out Women: the whole Uncle Vanya segment, in fact any aspect that shows the director at work; most significantly, the relationship between the director and young man whom he’d seen having sex w/ his wife and whom he casts as the lead in Uncle Vanya - which is to say that the most powerful and unusual sequence, in which the actor/rival tells the director (and the driver overhears) a story of marital infidelity (the wife, we learn, is a screenwriter who shares her story ideas w/ husband/director); in short, the movie version is far more complex and profound than the 2 1/2 stories from the source, though lots of credit due of course to HM for his always surprising and inventive, yet grounded in social conditions of the day, stories and novels. 

Just a short note on a really long novel - The World as I Found It (1987), by Bruce Duffy - that I’d never heard of until reading of Duffy’s death and being struck by his unusual history: This novel, his first, received high praise on publication but he never was able to make a life as a full-time writer nor did he seem to make any connections that would have led to a teaching post, if that was what he would have liked, instead working in communications and some lesser-caliber jobs as he struggled w/ a 2nd novel, published after failure to find an agent and received almost no notice, and then a 3rd, ditto - although he did live to see World/Found It picked up by the estimable New York Review Books. And I picked it up, daunted by its length and depth - a novel that unfolds the life story of Wittgenstein, with side trips to others in W’s life, notably Bertrand Russell. So, OK, I read about 70 pp (book totals nearly 600), enough to see that it’s a hugely impressive work - how can he know so much about these strands of philosophy and the life and times of these diverse, and remote, characters/people? - yet not one for me. I found my only interest was in FW - and if that’s the case why wouldn’t I prefer to read a biography (I would) in which I could at least be assured of the veracity of the facts; by embarking on this alternate course, a true-life novel you might say, there’s some burden on the author to make the novel moving and beautiful, and I just found it a slog, on the literary level, though more promising (yet not enough to keep me engaged) on the philosophical level: for ex., he unravels some of Ressell’s thoughts via his conversation with the woman w/ whom he’s having an affair - yet this double vision in my view made the novel neither fish nor foul, so to speak: Much credit to Duffy, and to his readers, and even to the publishers who at least took a chance on this almost guaranteed to not be a best seller novel. 

Yes, inspired by Drive My Car, I re-read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, one of his 4 late-life plays, and was blown away by its beauty and pathos - as audiences (and readers) have universally for a century - the essence of what’s considered Chekhovian: adults living their late0life in a provincial setting, a sense that their lives were of great promise that has never materialized, much missed connections among the unmarried, who are generally on the cusp marital eligibility, time has passed them by, and secret longings are never realized or recognized much less consummated, bursts of violence and remorse, often (specifically in UV) a physician if I correctly remember about other Chekhov plays who can voice the weariness and the danger of the doctor’s life in that era of  few useful medicines and great unrelieved pain, and specific to UV the beautiful elegy by Sonya, who recognizes that she will most likely never marry, that she will be for the rest of her life consumed by menial chores to keep the estate running even though she derives no benefits from that, and her expression of faith and of its reward, which is neither heaven nor salvation but simply “rest.” What a knockout!

Chekhov’s TheThree Sisters is somewhat tough going for a reader who knows no Russian - as always hard to keep the characters straight, and there is is less distinction among the 3 than any readers would like - but this would not be a problem on stage, the best place to encounter any of AC’s late plays. The themes and motifs from earlier plays are abundant here as we’ll: the sense of a wasted life and failed opportunity, the failure to live up to high youthful expectations, some strange and moving passages in which the characters speak of their views as to what the world will or might become centuries later - with some thinking the world will be much the same, cold and miserable, and others (specifically, the Baron) believing that the world will get better and better and though we in the present will never sense of know this we are leaving a better world for future generations, etc. As to the characters’ life in the present, as usual there is some high drama (a fire that nearly destroys the provincial town of the setting), a shooting death, a physician who’s a bit of an outsider and an incompetent (AC’s negative version of himself?). What emerges here and that we did not see in Vanya per is the yearning of those confined to provincial life, the eponymous sisters in particular, who yearn to return to  Moscow and of course never will be able to do so - there’s a great sense of loss when the military squadron, who created all of the social life in this province - are reassigned and leave town; military life here seems to be about everything but the fighting - and we can see this in other AC works (e.g., The Kiss) and even in Shakespeare (e.g., Much Ado).