Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88

By BRUCE WEBER

Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore. He was 88.

His stepson Cole Behringer said he died of natural causes in the long-term care facility where he had spent the last two years.

From the 1950s into 1970s, Mr. Fussell followed a conventional academic path, teaching and writing on literary topics, specializing in 18th-century British poetry and prose. But his career changed in 1975, when he published “The Great War and Modern Memory,” a monumental study of World War I and how its horrors fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility.

“The Great War,” a work that drew on Mr. Fussell’s own bloody experience as an infantryman during World War II, won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and theNational Book Award for Arts and Letters.

Fussell’s influence was huge, Vincent B. Sherry wrote in “The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War.” “The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.”

The lavish praise and commercial success of “The Great War” transformed Mr. Fussell into a public intellectual, or perhaps more accurately a public curmudgeon; he crabbed, for instance, about Graham Greene’s “inability to master English syntax.” Mr. Fussell brought an erudition, a gift for readable prose, a willingness to offend and, as many critics noted, a whiff of snobbery to subjects like class, clothing, the dumbing down of American culture and the literature of travel.

“Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars” (1980) examined a tradition in writing rarely examined by scholars, and it was hailed for its critical acumen, though it also includes a rant against tourists and tourism, which he decries as the antithesis of ennobling travel and the bane of real travelers.

“ ‘Abroad’ is an exemplary piece of criticism,” Jonathan Raban wrote on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. “It is immensely readable. It bristles with ideas. It disinters a real lost masterpiece from the library stacks. It admits a whole area of writing — at last! — to its proper place in literary history. Its general thesis is, I think, wrongheaded, even mean, but Mr. Fussell argues it with such force and clarity that he makes it a pleasure to quarrel with him.”

In “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System” (1983), he divided American society into nine strata — from the idle rich (“the top out-of-sight”) to the institutionalized and imprisoned (“the bottom out-of-sight”) — and offered a comprehensive and often witty tour through the observable habits of each.

“Not smoking at all is very upper-class,” he wrote, “but in any way calling attention to one’s abstinence drops one to middle-class immediately.”

In “BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America” (1991), he offered an alphabetically organized jeremiad against everything “phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant or boring” in this country “that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright or fascinating.”

“Dismal food is bad,” he wrote. “Dismal food pretentiously served in a restaurant associated with the word ‘gourmet’ is BAD. Being alert to this distinction is a large part of the fun of being alive today, in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash.”

Paul Fussell Jr., was born into an affluent family in Pasadena, Calif., on March 22, 1924. His father was a prominent lawyer. Paul attended Pomona College, from which he was drafted by the Army in 1943. Too late for the Allied invasion at Normandy, he nevertheless saw brutal action in Europe, where, in southeastern France, at age 20, he lay wounded while men under his command were being killed in an artillery barrage.

“Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine-gun holding us up; he was struck in the heart and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of blood, tissue and powdered cloth,” Mr. Fussell wrote in a 1982 essay in Harper’s Magazine called “My War.” “Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves.”

During his tour of duty he won the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts — he was wounded in the back and legs — and he emerged with a disdain for those who would justify wars, especially those who never fought. He hammered the point in “The Great War” and other books, including “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War” (1989), a relentless chronicle of everything that was dreadful or repugnant about the soldiering experience in World War II, and a memoir, “Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic” (1996).

Returning to Pomona in 1945, he earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1947 and went on to Harvard to earn a master’s and a doctorate in English. At Harvard he developed a disdain for academia akin to what he felt for the military. “From the 1950s on,” he wrote in “Doing Battle,” “my presiding emotion was annoyance, often intensifying to virtually disabling anger.”

Nonetheless, he pursued an academic career, teaching English first at Connecticut College for Women, then at Rutgers University and finally at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many academic books were “The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke” (1965), “Poetic Meter and Poetic Form” (1965; revised, 1979), and “Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing” (1971).

These were books, he would later recall, that he was “supposed to write.” Then it struck him that he might reach a wider audience by comparing the art and literature created in response to earlier wars with that inspired by World War I. What he discovered was a deep fissure between the romantic views of the past, which saw warfare as a stage for gallantry and heroism, and the disillusionment bred by the shocking slaughter and grim hopelessness of trench warfare, the hallmark of “the great war.”

World War I’s chief cultural product was irony, Mr. Fussell found, as illustrated by the muttering, cynical language of the men on the battle lines and their governments’ fatuous appeals to patriotism. Popular and serious culture afterward was infused with “the sense of absurdity, disjuncture and polarization, the loathing of duly constituted authorities,” as the critic Robert Hughes wrote in a Time magazine review.

“Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected,” Mr. Fussell wrote. “Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends. Eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.”

Mr. Fussell’s marriage to the former Betty Ellen Harper, who later became known for writing about food under the name Betty Fussell, ended in divorce. (Ms. Fussell, in a 1999 memoir, “My Kitchen Wars,” wrote scathingly about their marriage.) He is survived by their two children, Sam and Rosalind Fussell; his wife, Harriette Behringer; four stepchildren, Cole, Roclin, Marcy and Liese Behringer; a sister, Florence Fussell-Lind; 10 step-grandchildren and 6 step-great-grandchildren.

As caustic as Mr. Fussell could be about war (and many other things), he believed that the psychic wounds he sustained in battle were not only indelible but also beneficial.

“As I say in this new book of mine, not merely did I learn to kill,” he told Sheldon Hackney, who was then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a 1996 interview about “Doing Battle.” “But I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing,” he added.

“You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That’s salutary. It’s well to know exactly who you are, so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.”

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt contributed reporting.

Jealousy

IT WAS THE FACE of F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus that finally touched me off. Who knew that envy had so many expressions, that it was such a great subject? Why hadn't I gotten it before? I had seen Amadeusseveral times over the years, but this is how it is with movies, with books, with everything — you need the eyes to see what is to be seen. But even so, how could I still have thought that it was about Mozart. About — what does "about" even mean? Centering on? Mapping to? Representing? Mozart in the film has nothing to do with the Mozart of artistic imagination or our received notions of greatness. He is a silly little grasshopper, a buffoon, even though sublime melodies are seen to issue from his every pen stroke. He very clearly cannot help his genius; it has been stuffed into him like an irrepressible filling. I never understood: how could the man, the boy-man, be such a fool? It made no sense. At least not if Amadeus was viewed as his movie, about him. But the other night — it took this long — I got that I'd been dense. Amadeus was about Salieri, first to last, and if Mozart came across as he unflatteringly did, it was because Salieri cast him so in his rancorous memory. The gulf between Mozart's personality and his gift was what his rival saw, what his jealous rage projected.

In Abraham's portrayal of Salieri, there is only one dominant emotion — envy — though it is refracted through innumerable facets. Mostly we find envy disguised, or almost successfully suppressed, because it is unseemly, shaming, one of the all-too-human states that will not accept any positive re-frame. That qualifies it, indeed, as a Deadly Sin. Envy is what it is, we all know what it is — it is ugly. To betray any sign of envy is to lower oneself, period. And the only time in the movie when Abraham is not trying to disguise what he feels, not dissimulating, is when he has (in the movie's opening scene) slashed his throat. He has gone mad. His servants break the door in and find him in his bloody death throes; he is rushed away — first, presumably, to a hospital, and then, later, to an asylum. There a young priest goes to talk with him. When the young man, who claims to have some familiarity with music, recognizes neither him nor his work, Salieri launches upon his self-accounting, a confession of sorts, and this becomes the stuff of the narrative.

Canary. That's code from my childhood. When someone in my family showed in any way that they were jealous, covetous, envious of something that another had, one of us would unfailingly mutter "canary" as a shaming poke in the ribs. The origin of the reference is an old, now almost ectoplasmically faded photograph that was taken on the occasion of my sister Andra's birthday. Just turned seven or eight, she stands in the near foreground, beaming, her eyes alight. My mother leans in beside her, smiling for the camera. Directly in front of my sister, the reason for her joy: a cage with a little canary on its perch. And there in the background, glowering — making not the slightest attempt to put a face on things — me. 

My clouded scowl is there to be read by anyone — a kind of universal signifier of a person wanting something that someone else has. And while a whole family narrative could be unfolded from that bit of visual origami, I don't know how accurate it would be. On the surface, sure. Sister gets bird, brother wants bird. But in truth I don't remember having any special avidness for the creature itself, the chirping seed-spitter. I only remember we covered the cage with a towel every night so that it wouldn't start making noise in the morning. I have no memory of holding it on my finger, or blowing at its feathers, no memory at all, really. I may have already suspected that there is no real pleasure in owning birds. I think it was more that I just wanted. If there is an ur-narrative to be found, that might be it. Freud writes somewhere that the mother of all stories is the Fort-da:Fort being the child's cry of loss and yearning as it hurls some object from its crib, and da its satisfied response when the thing is returned. I was embracing the first part of the sequence, the wanting, the not-having, as was Salieri throughout the movie. Wanting and not getting, or wanting and not having — or almost having — might be story enough. Just plain Fort.

The first scene in which envy figures I cannot imagine being improved upon. Salieri, court composer for the Emperor Joseph, is waiting, along with the Emperor, his Kappelmeister, and other peruked advisers and dignitaries, for the arrival in court of the young prodigy, Mozart. Salieri has never set eyes upon him, and before the ceremony we see him wandering through the crowded reception rooms trying to imagine which of the dignitaries he sees might be the composer. He is looking to match his sense of beauty and greatness to the right physiognomy — as if there could be such a fit, as if an inner gift would be manifest in outward nobility or grace. But then, spotting an array of desserts, he wanders into a side chamber, where he becomes unwitting spectator of a game of erotic "chase" — a loud and ill-mannered young man goes scuttling under a table to get his hands on a buxom young woman. He has a particularly ear-grating high giggle.

Of course the young man proves to be... But no, it's more delightfully painful than that. For as it happens, Salieri has composed a little piece to be played upon the distinguished visitor's entrance, and the Emperor, who fancies himself a pianist, wants to play it himself. Which, as soon as Mozart is announced, he undertakes to do — somewhat stumblingly. It is a perfect confutation of expectations on various fronts, but the real point of the scene, the psychological crux, is that it marks the first decisive ego-blow to Salieri, who has already shown himself to be a self-involved and completely political animal, Machiavelli's perfect courtier, moderating his every opinion when asked, blowing this way and that to stay on the Emperor's good side. First comes the obvious — expected — revelation, and we note Salieri's expression when it's revealed that great prodigy is none other than the giggling fool that he had been spying on. Adding insult is the fact that the Emperor, who Salieri has been courting so carefully, is so obviously thrilled to be in the presence of  "genius."

But the topper comes when Salieri, making a bid for praise, looks to present Mozart with the elegantly ribboned score to his piece. Yet another awkward moment. Mozart does not reach to take the gift, but says, laughingly, that he has no need of it, he has already committed the piece to memory. What? The Emperor is incredulous. This seems to him impossible, as must any display of giftedness to another who is not so gifted. He smiles his thin smile, sure he will be vindicated in his skepticism. "Show me," he commands. Whereupon — and these are the glory moments we dream for ourselves, translated into whatever situation — Mozart sits down at the little spinet and reproduces Salieri's composition exactly. Moreover, he does so with such ease, such a suggestion of musical condescension, that it is clear to all that Salieri's inventions are obvious, predictable. The expression on Salieri's face, dissimulate though we would, makes clear the depth of the wound. Which is deepened further and rubbed with salt when Mozart begins altering the melody, saying things like, "that doesn't really work there, does it?" and "this is better — like this!"

This initiating scene is not so much an enactment of jealousy or envy as it is a paving of the way for the crashing breakout that comes a short time later. Mozart has become a composer at the Emperor's court, but however great the honor, his finances are precarious. There is a scene in which Mozart's wife, Constanza — the young woman we had seen him chasing after earlier — visits Salieri. She has come without her husband's knowledge. He is, it appears, too proud to apply for a post as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth of Wurttemberg, but, as Constanza explains, they need the money. She has with her a sheaf of manuscripts — originals, as it turns out — to show Salieri. Taking them from her, he is, at first, amused, high-handedly pleased to be in the ascendant position. But when he pauses to look — glance, really — at the top sheet, everything changes. You could say, the whole movie turns at this instant. Beauty has entered the room. For it is immediately clear to Salieri's trained eye that these are the marks of musical genius. For a moment we see rapture on his face, and then the ebb.Alea jacta est: the die is cast.

For it is not enough for the purpose of this drama — this tragedy — that Salieri should envy the young composer his musical accomplishments or courtly attainments. For the stakes to be raised, for the true pity and terror to emerge, he must also feel the true beauty of the music and recognize the extent of the gift that makes it possible. And this is exactly the tension: hecan grasp, and adore, that which he cannot himself create, much as he wants to. The record will show it: Salieri was not a hack — he was himself a gifted and accomplished composer. But the anti-hero of Amadeus is not, and knows he can never be, capable of writing the notes on these pages. Here is the tension: he must be complex enough to love the music unreservedly, and at the same time envy and despise its creator.

I have possibly confused matters by bringing up my canary episode, for I am talking here about artistic envy, and not the myriad other sorts of covetousness, but I will let the image of the sulking boy remain, if only to underscore that the feeling, or mindstate, I'm exploring is itself very basic, however lofty the realms in which it is found. What I felt that day standing behind my mother and sister is, I suspect, not so different from what any mature artist might feel when the prize — any prize — is bestowed upon his rival, or even colleague.

Still, I want to distinguish, for I think there are differences — important differences — between workaday envy and what I'm calling artistic envy. Workaday envy — dog eyeing other dog's bone — is the aggrieved recognition that someone owns something that we want, or can achieve something we wish we could, or is being rewarded for something that we ourselves could do, or have done. Common envy, dare I say universal envy, encompasses many things. It starts before we've outgrown the playpen, and I'm not sure that it stops. Its traces stay vivid. I still remember envying one kid's pellet rifle, and another's hair; this one's washboard stomach, that one's pretty girlfriend — and the fact that he swam such a beautiful butterfly stroke, or had those people for friends, or could spend weekend nights "out" without penalty. This is my version of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad. Almost in every case my envy was for what some other guy had, and it was usually a guy more or less my age. I did not often envy older guys, for between myself and them fell the shadow of the fantasy — that it could all still happen, the washboard stomach, the girls.

There were so many things I wanted that I did not have, but they were things, attributes, instances of great good luck. But I don't believe that I ever wanted to actually be someone else. Not that there were not, especially in those early years, any number of people who had an abundance of the most desirable things: easy families, comradely siblings, looks, good throwing arms, popularity. But for all that, I did not fantasize having what they had in full — having their complete lives. I wanted to have what they had while still being me. This is obvious, or is it? To wish to be someone else is tantamount to wishing oneself dead. For me to be Billy Lee or Ted Wilkinson would mean that Sven would have to cease to exist. No, the dream was to be myself with Billy's lanky athletic build and Ted's pretty girlfriend — that one!

Perhaps even to wish for those things was to wish for a partial death. For if I had either, or both, I would to that extent not be myself, but someone else, some person thus endowed and gifted. And therefore, I began to realize — this is how we become philosophers — I would no longer be the person wanting; I would be someone else.  I tell myself that for this very reason, out of such understanding, I have outgrown this basic sort of envy. I can now see that my colleague has a sharp suit and a good-looking new car and I feel nothing. Plans for a trip abroad? Lovely, I say, but I say it without grinding my molars. He would be traveling through the south of France, yes, but he wouldn't be me traveling there, so what do I care?

But then he mentions he has an essay forthcoming in Harper's. Well.  Artistic envy, my real subject — and arrived at so circuitously!  Of course this is why Amadeus struck me as it did. Not that I will next unmask as Salieri. There are gradations to everything. But neither can I pretend. Nothing more fully discloses the artist's, the writer's, flawed character than envy of a peer.  Unappealing, if not unspeakable, certainly very hard to own up to. Our trade is with deep and noble matters. So it is. But find me an artist who is without artistic envy. If you do, you will have found a genius who has never doubted himself.

Again, distinctions are in order. It is one thing to be jealous of, to envy, outward success — where another writer publishes his or her work (my colleague's Harper's essay) — another to feel those things about the work itself. An exhibit or a well-placed publication equals exposure, and insofar as we believe in what we do, we all hope to have it set before the best possible audience. That is the completing of the circuit. And when I see that someone has achieved just such placement, I feel the pang of wanting it for myself. If that someone is a writer I know, I feel an extra pang, one that is only rarely pleasurable, is far more commonly tinged with darker hues. Would I want to publish there? Yes! Am I being published there? No. And even if I have in the past had that good luck, or may in the future, it's not happening now. It can't be, because it's happening to someone else.

Do I want their good fortune? Yes, though I try hard to rise above that wanting. Do I want to have written what they wrote? No. I look into my soul and see that mostly — mostly — I don't. For like that transaction I cited earlier, to want to have done that is, in effect, to want to be them. And for the same good reason I do not — even if they are having the most remarkably surging career, the proudest accolades. For if I were them I wouldn't be me. The shell game of identity: I ceased being me, being them would not matter, for they already are themselves.

But I used the qualifier "mostly." Why mostly? Is there some catch, some exception? There is, but it's tricky. The exception is when a work achieves what I experience as an absolute artistic beauty. Every so often it happens. I come upon the Coleridgean "right words in the right order." They are so right that I cannot imagine them being improved upon, so right that I feel them singing through me. Not just for a phrase or a sentence, but for an extended period, maybe a whole work. The Great Gatsby, Joyce's "The Dead," pages of Melville, Woolf — at these moments, like when Salieri throws a glance at Mozart's manuscript and we see his whole being change, all bets are off. Then, so long as I'm reading, so long as I feel the live presence of beauty, I want to have been its author. I want to have written the words, and therefore, syllogistically, to be the person who wrote them — damn the consumption, the debtor's prison. I no longer worry that this would mean that I cease to be myself because, you see, I did write them! That is, they are the very words I would have written on this very subject, whatever it is, and I know this because of the pure hum of the resonance. This is what certifies their beauty, the idea that in them I see some purest self captured and immobilized. To become the person who wrote that prose, that poetry, would mean that I had, at long last, truly become myself. In the moment of the full encounter, of merging, beauty swallows all, and I feel that no one has ever spoken so clearly how things are or who one is. In the flow of so much rightness it is possible to think that identity is porous. How else could I feel something so purely, be so completely removed from my daily self? I am Nabokov, I am Bellow, I am Woolf, I am whoever wrote that perfect paragraph: William Maxwell, John Banville, James Agee. I am, at that moment, perfectly mapped to that other mind. And so complete is my absorption, my identification, that I have nothing left over that can register envy or covetousness.

Encounters with beauty are few, though, and the spell, wonderful as it is, all-confirming as it is, does wear off. And when it does, one is back to the expository ordinary, feeling the shortfall, having sidebar thoughts and judgments even as one is reading or listening or looking.

Not so Antonio Salieri. What gives Amadeus its torque is not only the intensity of Salieri's states, his reactions, but the fact that they flower into the deepest possible obsession. He is written from the start as a tragic character, capable of tragic emotion. He is shown cutting his own throat, for God's sake! When Mozart mocks his composition at their first meeting, he is pierced to the core: his art has been exposed. By the same token, when he looks at the notations on Mozart's manuscript pages, when he creates that music in his mind, he is overwhelmed. Admiration — love — sweeps through him. There has never been anything more beautiful. For that brief moment he is undivided. We see it plainly on his face. He experiences no retributive emotion, no anguish of inferiority, only what Nabokov called "aesthetic bliss." And so long as that lasts he is entirely his better self.  Then, as must happen, he takes his eyes from the page. The music stops. He is back inside what he now knows more than ever to be his demonstrably inferior self. He is, he understands, no Mozart — a recognition paradoxically more painful by the fact that Mozart is no Mozart, either. The Mozart of the heavenly music has no relation to the giggly buffoon who makes fart-jokes. What Salieri must swallow is that God — in whom he absolutely believes — has seen fit to give to impish Mozart the gift of making beauty, and to him only the secondary gift, no gift at all, of being able to recognize it.

Salieri's investment — and thus his despair — are absolute. They need to be in order for Salieri to hatch his plan and for the drama to play out with full tragic resonance. His plan — for which there is actually no historical warrant — is to get Mozart (through the device of a mysterious commission) to write a Requiem Mass, and then, when the work is complete, to poison his rival and achieve musical immortality by passing the Mass (for Mozart) off as his own composition.

Salieri looks for his chance, and when Mozart, exhausted from his work on The Magic Flute, collapses during a performance, Salieri has him rushed back to his apartments. Mozart's wife and young son are away — a fine coincidence. Even as Salieri claims to be nursing the delirious composer back to health, he convinces Mozart that he must finish the Mass in the next 24-hours if he wants to get paid. Mozart, reeling from the exertion, entrusts the copy work to Salieri. The extended scene of 11^th hour composition is deftly orchestrated. Mozart dictates with inspired brilliance; Salieri gets it all down in his own hand.  He is initially conniving, but — again — we see the music take him over. For extended moments he is past all contingency, all nefarious plotting. When the end of this marathon of composition is nearly in sight, Mozart gives out. He asks for a break. Salieri almost cannot bear to stop, but he relents. Alas for him. For while composer and 'scribe' are sleeping, the door bursts open. Driven by presentiment, Constanza has returned. As soon as she sees her husband's condition, she locks away the manuscript and orders Salieri to leave. The man is beside himself: just one last little bit is needed. He begs. But to no avail. At that moment Mozart dies. The magnificent engine of beauty is suddenly stilled. The great Requiem is unfinished and the plan is foiled.  Salieri's apotheosis is not to be.

His apotheosis: he planned, in effect, to become his rival and pass off the man's inspiration as his own. Upon Mozart's death, the world would believe that Salieri had not only written the transcendent music of the completed Requiem Mass, but had done so to honor his admired colleague. Not to be! And it was God that foiled him — this Salieri announces from the asylum as the movie ends. He would not be known as maestro and devoted friend. Instead, God had in mind for him to be, as he shouts out to his fellow inmates at the asylum, the "Patron Saint of Mediocrity."

For Salieri — once beauty has been identified — mediocrity is anything that is less. Mediocrity, the ordinary, sets off the remarkable, and the remarkable, the achieved, exposes everything that is lesser. Beauty declares what can be, and, by its rarity, makes the contrast: the fact that most of our dealings are on a lower plateau. Most of us accept this — it is the way of things — and we feel lifted when we step into the presence of greatness; we accept it as a gift, feel grateful. But the matter is different for those who, obeying whatever impulse, put the creation of beauty — of art — at the center of their lives. Highly attuned, they are also mercilessly comparative. Envy flourishes. Envy, like Milton's "fame" in Lycidas, is the "last infirmity of noble minds."

Salieri and the glowering boy by the canary cage would seem to stand at opposite poles. Man and child, the artistic and the ordinary. Yet it is through the familiar nerves of that glowering "I" that I understand Salieri, read his face, feel that I know exactly what he feels at every display of Mozart's unposed brilliance — "unposed" because genius, and maybe genius alone, has no need of postures. 

¤

It was out of a desire for expression, and, I would like to hope, a feeling for beauty, that I decided that I wanted to be a writer. That desire was, I have no doubt, awakened in me by early reading. If you are run through enough times by the words of others, you almost cannot not want to write. The identification of word combinations with pleasure is too intense to be ignored — or left just in the trust of others. So, years ago, it began: the apprenticeship in sentences, drawing on my many admirations, looking to get it right, whatever "it" was. At first, so I imagine now, the aspiration was innocent. The idea of an endless future precluded craving what others had: there would be time. But the feeling of an endless future diminishes, even as the expressive urge stays steady, and where there is the wanting that is writing — here's the curse — the other wanting will likely prosper, too. The one that does not easily speak its name.

Let me now invent Beasley. Beasley who I became aware of way back at the outset as a fellow writer, more or less my contemporary, doing what I do, often in the same available venues. And then we'd keep bumping into each other at literary events, tradings bits of gossip with each other as we tooth-picked cheese cubes; we would even sit together sometimes at the same big table with drinks after so-and-so's reading: Beasley, my literary alter ego, my semblable... Except that instead of one lone Beasley there were — thereare — allowing for some latitude in age, a dozen, maybe more, writers who I was aware of as members of my generation, who on a bad day would crowd me out of some slot I thought should be mine, but whom on a better day I maybe bumped aside... Of course I tracked my Beasleys from the start, pretending disinterest, but in fact reading their words with a keen measuring eye, for I knew, as one just knows things, that if my work, my name, were to mean anything, if it were to stick — last — it would be because I outpaced the Beasleys. Few names last, and a writer, like anyone else, is considered first alongside his peers.

I pretended for years not to care about "lasting" all that much, even imagined that that kind of mattering was no longer what literature was about. But the older I get, the more I think in terms of what has and hasn't fallen away over time. Posterity doesn't require you to be around for it — it doesn't even allow it. So who cares? That used to be my view. But somewhere in the last while it has dawned on me that it's not the posterity that one enjoys, but the imagining of it. A cold comfort, but better than no comfort at all.

 In his Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly asked:

What will have happened to the world in ten years' time? . . . To me? To my friends? . . .  To the books they write? Above all to the books — for, to put it another way, I have one ambition, to write a book that will hold good for ten years afterwards. And of how many to-day is that true?

When I first read that, many years ago, I thought how silly!  How odd, to care for that kind of lasting, "holding good," in a world that seems to morph away from old stabilities with every rotation, changing the terms of things by the day. Connolly wrote those words in 1939. What do any of these things mean now? How do we measure? Is it being on reading lists and syllabi? Having one's name recognized when it comes up in conversation? Having it even come up in conversation? Having one's books in print? Having them in print and selling? Selling more than such-and-such a number? I don't know which of these things matter, but somehow the idea of the work not disappearing — the idea that is the very root of ambition — does. 

Of course the Beasleys figure into all of this. All of them. For it is written into the law of things that wherever I turn now, wherever I look, a Beasley will appear. We have paid our dues, put in our time. I can't open a magazine now without one or another — or several — of my brethren greeting me in Roman or Italic font. This one is on a cover, or else is being reviewed with an excitement of adjectives. And here is the list of grantees, of inductees. I can't help but flash back to our leaner days, when that same Beasley was making a meal of the hors d'oeuvres. I know him, I know her, I know the work, I have stood with all of them and the bad merlot, and when grand recognitions are accorded, it's hard not to feel a certain pang. I may not make the canary face, but I experience the inner canary — which is the opposite, I realize, of the schadenfreude, that little bump of gratification that comes when the adjectives in that review are less effusive, when the list of grant awards or prize finalists has no Beasley. It seems less important, then, that it also has no me.

But here's the rub. With all these Beasleys working, sweating, producing, it is almost inevitable that a Beasley will from time to time produce a work of genuine value, of beauty. How not? They are, to a person, along with being ambitious, talented and able, some exceptionally so. And what strain this creates in the Beasley-watcher is intensity felt, oddly, in reverse proportion to the artistic achievement, and then increased or decreased by the esteem it is then accorded. By "reverse proportion" I mean that I am more tormented reading work that seems only slightly more accomplished than what I feel I am up to myself, and far less afflicted by encounters with evident brilliance. To be edged out in the ranking by the runner pushing ahead by a half-stride hurts more than to be trounced by someone who has the wind of the gods at his back. It's all so complicated. The more beautiful the art, the less I see it as the product of Beasley of the toothpicked cheese, the more it is something unto itself. True, I will, like Salieri, wonder "why him, Lord? Why not me?" But this is a different pain. It has more to do with the Lord than with Beasley. And the possibility seems greater that it might yet — another time — be me.

This would be a dark picture I'm painting were it not for the final turn, the happy — if only occasional — reprieve. It matters absolutely. I cannot judge in all this writing business how much that is of any real value comes from discipline and craft, and how much from luck, or from some happy convergence of impulse and inspiration. Whether it's nature or nurture, whether we are the vessels or vassals of something that is out of our control — I don't know. I only know that on those occasions when I feel it happening, that sense of separate parts of myself coming together, I have an illusion of timelessness. Inspiration changes the rules and renders all previous business moot. And so long as I am in its grip, imagining that I am making something that has a chance of mattering, of being somehow memorable, nothing that the Beasleys do or think or have attained matters in the least. I have no impulse of envy in me whatsoever. The absorption cancels everything else; I am happy to be in their ranks.

And with this comes the big realization — so hard to get to otherwise — which is that in those other times, when the Salieri mood is on me and I am so filled with wanting, it is not the Beasleys that I have been watching and measuring. Not them at all. I see it so clearly, and I am abashed. It has been me I have been looking toward, not the daily me, but the other: the ur-self, the one who when I started out, fresh and untested, was so sure of what he wanted. I knew so little, it's true. But I trusted. I didn't give a damn about what anyone else was up to, except those writers, my masters, who were so good that they stopped me in my tracks. There was no cage back then, no perch, just the fucking canary — me — chirping away.

Walker Percy

It's the birthday of Southern writer Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). Percy's early life was marked by tragedy: his grandfather and father both committed suicide with shotguns, and his mother drowned when her car ran off the road into a stream. When his uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, adopted Percy and his little brothers, things took a turn for the better; it was there that he met his lifelong best friend, the neighbor boy Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner — Percy was so overwhelmed that he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch.

Percy went off to college in Chapel Hill, and later to New York for medical school. He contracted tuberculosis and spent the next two years at a sanitarium. It was, he later said, "the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse."

Instead, Percy decided to be a full-time writer. He finished two novels—one was based on his experience at the sanitarium—neither of which he could not get published. But he kept at it, and his novel The Moviegoer (1961) came out when he was 45. A year later it won the National Book Award. Percy published five more novels and many essays.

In 1976 Percy was a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans when a woman called him, asking him to read her son's manuscript. He felt guilty turning her down—the woman's son had committed suicide in part because of his despair over not being able to find a publisher for his novel—so Percy agreed, and was so impressed that he conspired to get it published. The Confederacy of Dunces, 

China

2012 is something of an election year worldwide. As many as twenty-five presidents will have been elected by the time it ends, including heads of state of some of the world's most important countries: the United States, Russia, France...and the People's Republic of China. What is different about China, however, is that the election here is (as usual) held not by popular vote but confined to a core group at the centre of power. The identity of the new leader depends not on the people's support but to a considerable extent on the balance of forces inside ^↑ the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

If the identity of many of presidents is unknown until the people have delivered their verdict, in China the choice of the next head of state (and general secretary of the party ^↑ ) is known in advance. Unless there is a major, unforeseeable reversal, a key party congress towards the end of 2012 will select Xi Jinping ^↑ as the designated successor of Hu Jintao. There is a difference, though, with past experiences of transition, when the new leader emerged from an elderly group of senior cadres (Deng Xiaoping ^↑ is the classic example).
This time, according to reliable sources, the "constituency" that sanctioned Xi's appointment was composed of hundreds of senior party officials. True, the process by which he got to be nominated at all is less clear - a kind of black-box operation; but the very fact that his preferment will have ultimately required an election (albeit a limited one) to give him legitimacy suggests that the basis of the transfer of power in China has begun to respond to changing times.

But if the Xi Jinping era ^↑ is about to begin, it also means the Hu Jintao era is coming to an end. How to evaluate the past decade, and what signals does it offer for the next period?
A new cadre
In my view, these ten years have been a period of lack of progress and the absence of political reform ^↑ , which has meant that a backlog of various social problems (such as growing official corruption) has accumulated. The resulting tensions in society carry an enormous cost, including financial (with huge spending on domestic security, approaching the level of military expenditure). The overriding concern of this generation of leaders with ensuring "stability" has made them afraid of undertaking real action.

Why is that? The reason is that Hu Jintao and his colleagues in the heart of Chinese state power - the politburo's ^↑ standing committee - share almost the same background. They moved through the education system in an entirely closed environment which prioritised obedience, imparted selective information, valued technical subjects over the humanities and social sciences, and depleted the ability to think independently.
Most importantly, they were products of a political movement, in some cases children of "pariah" families persecuted during the cultural revolution, whose background taught them to be loyal and conformist. This mental structure was reinforced by their predominant training as "technicians" or "engineers". These are not visionary or even ambitious individuals, but people who have achieved their status by a kind of miracle and whose sole purpose is to keep hold ^↑ of it. Their subconscious attitude is conveyed by Hu Jintao's answer to a Japanese child who asked him why he wanted ^↑ to be president: "Because the Chinese people picked me".

What are the chances that Xi Jinping's generation will be different? In some ways the signs should be positive. The rising Chinese communist leaders also grew up in an atmosphere dominated by politics, but most of their adulthood has coincided with the reform and opening up era launched by Deng Xiaoping ^↑ at the end of the 1970s. They have had access to a far greater range of domestic and international information, enjoyed an affluent life, engaged in the pursuit of wealth and power, had the chance to travel to western countries and make contacts with people from them, and in some cases receive training in subjects such as economics and law. Again most importantly, they are active in politics rather then being mere products of politics.

These children of the 1980s acquired early an awareness of the dark and ruthless arts of politics as conducted in communist China, as well as of the new opportunities becoming available in business. Three in particular of the successor generation focused their commitment on politics: Xi Jinping, Liu Yuan ^↑ (son of former president Liu Shaoqi ^↑ ) and Bo Xilai (son of another veteran, Bo Yibo ^↑ ). Almost at the same time, these three chose the same road after graduating from university by moving to the provinces and establishing a local power-base.
Two decades later, they entered the CCP's core leadership team, with Xi Jinping identified early as the likeliest candidate ^↑ to be the next general secretary - and Bo Xilai as the most remarkable figure in China's political arena. Now, however, the discrediting of Bo Xilai after the extraordinary events ^↑ in his Chongqing fiefdom has halted his rise - leaving the political field more open and less assured than it had seemed.

The approach of veterans' ^↑ children to the summit of Chinese power should be favourable to political reform, if only because hardline political opponents will find it harder to attack their credentials. A comparison here, even though not necessarily a welcome one, is the way that Chiang Kai-shek's son launched Taiwan's political democratisation ^↑ . The next leadership might in this respect have more imaginative as well as political space than its predecessor.
A bold design
In 2011, the intellectual Zhang Musheng - author of an influential study of rural development in the pre-reform era - published a book ^↑ that advocated the implementation of a "new democracy" in China. This was needed, he said, to address the legacy of domestic problems that had built up over the three decades of reform. The support of workers and peasants can only be assured by giving them education, healthcare, social welfare, minimum housing security, industrial training; and a shift from the current model of polluting and resource-intensive production to greater worker and farner participation in the process of economic change.
Zhang's reform design is bold ^↑ , involving mutualisation of state-owned assets and widespread share-ownership by citizens, in part to solve the problem of the welfare needs ^↑ of people on low incomes. He also recommends ^↑ that the CCP allows open factions, independent trade unions and farmers' associations, and freedom of the press. “Only the Chinese Communist Party can save China; only new democracy can save the Chinese Communist Party”, he writes.

The book provoked ^↑ a debate among Chinese intellectuals that lasted six months. Zhang Musheng (whose mentor was Chen Yizi ^↑ , adviser to prime minister Zhao Ziyang ^↑ before the latter fell following the Tiananmen incident in 1989) continued to insist that a new collective leadership in China cannot allow the current situation to continue, and that people's desire for change is an indisputable reality. Without political change, an authoritarian regime that seeks to postpone reform will risk ^↑ the fate of the Soviet Union and its satellites (or, closer to home, the Qing ^↑ dynasty that ended in 1911). Will China's next generation understand the extent of the crisis, and the tide of history that awaits it?

John Cheever

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer who said, "Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world." John Cheever (books by this author), born in Quincy, Massachusetts (1912). He was known asthe "Ovid of Ossining" for his stories of suburban life — he lived in Ossining, a suburb in Westchester County. He was a funny man — as his son said, "He'd break a leg to get a laugh." In 1978, he published a collection, The Stories of John Cheever, and it won the PulitzerPrize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. But he died just four years later, in 1982. Almost 10 years later, his journals were published, which contained revelations of his affairs with men, his depression, and alcoholism.

Desert Islands

COURTESY OF THE NEW YORKER.

You’d think by now, in a world equipped with G.P.S. and Google Earth, cartoonists would have wrung every last drop of humor from the premise of castaways marooned on desert islands. After all, they seem to have finally run through ladies trying to return hats and dresses for frivolous reasons, and explorers stewing in cannibal pots. And won’t the castaways reveal themselves, anyway, when they inevitably check in on FourSquare, so where’s the joke?

But this week, there on page 58 of The New Yorker is a witty, terrific cartoon by Bob Mankoff, set on a desert island with just enough room for two castaways, both shirtless and wearing shredded pants, and a single palm tree sprouting from the middle of the island—classic!

Mankoff is also The New Yorker’s cartoon editor. (His blog, a must for cartoon fans, is here.) Always eager for an excuse—any excuse—to talk venerable cartoon tropes, I gave him a call to discuss the history of this genre, to which he was only the most recent contributor:
Bruce Handy: Tell me—is there a patient zero for the desert-island cartoon?

Bob Mankoff: The desert-island cartoon originally comes out of desert-island literature—Robinson Crusoe. It’s the classic thing of tragedy plus time equals comedy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, shipwrecks were common and you could actually be stranded, and people werestranded, on desert islands. Our desert-island cartoons probably started in the 1930s.

One of the interesting things about that is that originally the desert island in cartoons is quite large, and the ship is sinking in the background, so there’s a narrative. You sort of understand how they got on the island. Later, the island becomes an icon [i.e., the tiny island with a single palm tree].

Probably there were desert-island cartoons in comic magazines that preceded The New Yorker. I don’t know specifically, but probably in Judge and Life, comic magazines that precede TheNew Yorker [which debuted in 1925] and that New Yorker cartoonists probably worked on in the early part of the century, and even in the 20s.

Is it true that at one point William Shawn [who edited The New Yorker between 1952 and 1987] banned desert-island cartoons?

I think at one point everyone banned them, because they get tired of them. But the genre keeps morphing, if you will, to change with the times. On our database I see more than 360 desert-island cartoons. The original ones were more about isolation from the strictures of society, especially the moral strictures of the time. If a man and a woman were on the island in the 30s or 40s, the cartoon probably has a sexual content. The woman might be asking the man, “How can I be sure you’re a millionaire?”

Then, later, the cartoons represent different things, mostly just isolation. And eventually they just represent the cartoon trope, if you will. For instance, I did a cartoon in the 80s that has a man on a desert island thinking, “No man is an island, but I come pretty damn close.” And he’s tiny, and the island is tiny. And that’s one of the interesting things that happened over the years, that it’s not a real island anymore. Originally it was a real island. Now it’s more the idea of an island, an icon.

That’s one thing that’s so great in contemporary desert-island cartoons: they’re so graphic and simple. They’re pure.

Whereas, as I said, the original islands have debris on them—a life preserver, that kind of thing—more realistic details. They’re not iconic because it has yet to be established what the iconography is.

I once did a search [on our database] and I think the year of the greatest popularity of desert-island cartoons in The New Yorker is 1957, when 17 appeared.

Why a spike in 1957?

I wonder if it was some kind of Cold War statement, or fear of the bomb. Maybe something about social isolation—The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit—or wanting to flee society’s strictures.

As the magazine’s cartoon editor, do you feel you have to set a higher bar for desert-island cartoons?

Oh yeah, there’s always a sliding scale. Desert-island cartoons are like lightbulb jokes. It’s not like you can use them up. They can act like kudzu—they can take over everything. Sort of like animal cartoons can, because they’re easy and natural to do. There once was an issue in 1959 in which Jim Garaghty, who was the cartoon editor at the time, said, “O.K., enough animal cartoons.” So they ran all animal cartoons in a 1959 issue. And nobody noticed.

So yeah, it’s definitely a higher bar for desert-island cartoons, because it’s an easier joke to make. It’s easier to relate it to almost anything at all. And also now the jokes tend to be almost completely self-referential.

Do you get at least one a week in submissions?

Probably. These clichés and genres taper off. Partly they taper off because of whatever the political climate is. For example, in the 30s and 40s there were lots and lots of cartoons about sugar daddies, and all the money that they’re giving to women, and alimony, and divorce. You have cartoons in the 30s and 40s which take sexual harassment as a given.

That Peter Arno stuff.

Absolutely. The guy chasing his secretary—he says, “Do you realize, Miss, that my time is worth $30 an hour?” That type of stuff. (It’s in the 40s so the money makes sense.)

So you see tapering off with some genres—not so much with the desert-island cartoon, but certainly with Eskimo cartoons and the gods-are-angry cartoons. In the 50s and 60s there are a lot of cartoons with natives in Africa, and you won’t have any of those now. So those genres tend to go in and out. And also now, because you have a whole younger generation, if they do a genre like the desert-island cartoon, it will be in a very ironic way.

Is there anyone generally considered the master of the desert-island cartoon?

I think it’s in everyone’s palette. 

For more, check out The New Yorker’s Cartoon Bank, where you can find pretty much any cartoon that ever ran in the magazine. You can even search for “cannibal pots.”

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