Night’s Angels
Reading Log, Fall 2023
Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille. This pornographic fantasia from 1928 is so bent on being transgressive that it becomes unintentionally campy, being especially energetic in its depictions of coprophilia and urolognia. Bataille’s afterword provides a Freudian gloss on the novel’s motifs of eyes, genitals, and eggs, identifying their origins within traumas experienced by the author in childhood. Efficient of the author, really, to provide both the text and the exegesis. The translation is by Joachim Neugroschel.
The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. It has taken me two decades to read this monument of Renaissance literature, which in its New York Review of Books edition — itself taken from a previous text published in 1932 by the Everyman’s Library—comes to 1392 pages. It is difficult to describe this massive tome, as it is not so much a treatise about a psychological condition as a summation of vast swathes of Western thought. It is abundantly, gloriously discursive; Burton’s style is clear and conversational despite his habit of producing long lists of descriptions or items. The book is a gigantic cento; much of it consists of Burton quoting historians or writers who came before him, mostly from the Bible and the Greek and Roman classics. One of the many engaging things about it is Burton’s way of thinking in prose; he will ponder some characteristic or fact at length, only to arrive, inevitably, at a volta where he reverses the direction of his thought. In his introduction to the 1932 edition, Holbrooke Jackson spoke of how the “book recognizes itself as a recital of fearful changeabilities,” and this sense of flexibility, of being intellectually game, inheres in the author’s ever-shifting perspective. Sometimes, charmingly, he catches up with the fact that he has been rambling, usually with a sheepish “But I rove.” The book contains endless stores of marvelous passages and phrases. “We are sent as so many soldiers into this world, to strive with it, the flesh, the devil,” he writes. “Our life is a warfare, and who knows it not?”
I will say that, all of this aside, there is something disorienting about returning to Burton after having been immersed over the last three years in the works of Sir Thomas Browne. Although Jackson writes approvingly that Burton “does not invent a phrase for its own sake and then stand back to admire it as one feels Browne doing,” I have rather the opposite reaction: After Browne’s marvelously recondite mysticism, Burton feels a little … thin, if the word can be used in describing a book of 1400 pages. This qualifies, of course, as a minor-key note on a surfeit of pleasures, and I expect to renew acquaintance with both writers, intermittently, for a long time.
Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter. This strange and not entirely successful lost classic of neo-noir has elements that are very stirring, but it can’t quite decide what kind of novel it wants to be, and thus loses a certain momentum. The opening chapter is stunningly good—a compact, iron-hard depiction of a Depression-era Western town; everything that follows seems faintly anti-climactic. The first third of the novel is about small-time pool hustlers and con men working the West Coast, the second is a dutiful prison novel in miniature, and the third veers off into a Mildred Pierce-like depiction of lower-middle-class life in close focus. It’s like the author wanted to prove that he was capable of writing different kinds of books, all at once. The author tries manfully to endow his inarticulate anti-heroes with rich interior lives, but it’s a slog at times.
The Spirit of the Age, by William Hazlitt. The newest and least shameful of my many addictions is buying used copies of the Oxford World’s Classics series online. Light but sturdy, these minimalist hardcovers, published in the middle of the last century, make ideal subway reading, as they fit tidily into the pocket of a blazer or suit jacket. As for Hazlitt, it was a pleasure to renew acquaintance with this wise and humane critic. First published in 1825, the character sketches in The Spirit of the Age are so graceful and illuminating as to reward attention even when the subject is some long-forgotten statesman or orator. The essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the crisp demolition of Thomas Malthus and his discontents, are particularly masterful. A grace note: in Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, which I read at an impressionable age, the protagonist is given this writerly advice by one of the grandees: “Read Hazlitt. Read Hazlitt, and write every morning.”
Fruit of the Dead, by Rachel Lyon. Feeling slightly shameful about devouring this cunning bit of pulpy literary fiction manqué while more substantive pursuits await. The novel concerns an anomic young woman who goes to work for a charismatic CEO on a lush private island; shenanigans ensue. There is a somewhat labored extended allusion to the myth of Persephone, but the prose in general is beautifully modulated, and includes fine passages that accurately depict the seductive undertow of inebriation.
“Areopagitica,” by John Milton. After experiencing Browne’s dreamy, sonorous excursae and Burton’s capacious energy, Milton feels downright ornery. Milton was combative — like all writers, he was saturated with the emotional temper of his time, an age of often brutal internecine violence, bristling with hostility and paranoia, overheated by a religious factionalism so extreme that it is difficult to imagine. The knotty turnings of these ferocious disputes over long-forgotten schisms still have a grave, elegant beauty; their density and general unintelligibility means that they make great subway reading as per The Spirit of the Age and other Oxford volumes, above.
Selected Poems, Ezra Pound. A battered used copy of this slim selection — a New Directions “paperbook” first published in 1957 — did not survive The Great Book Purge, but I missed having it on my nightstand, so I picked up a new copy direct from the publisher. I cannot be bothered with the early imagistic poems or the translations from the Chinese; but the selection from Homage to Sextus Propertius is entrancing, and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” is, to my mind, the foundational document of high modernist poetry.
Supplication: Selected Poems; The Hotel Wentley Poems, by John Wieners. The poetry of this haunted man, who died in 2002, has flickered on the periphery of my awareness ever since I was a young editor and aspirational poetry aficionado living in Boston. The connection was immediate: “Night’s angels descend on us, its / light become accustomed to our eyes. Cool wind blows in open window,” goes one early poem; “I am happy being alone.” A gay drug addict and authentic street hustler, Wieners’s poems combine topical grit and squalor with ecstasies of tender yearning; the appeal to my sensibility thus immediate and obvious. During one of my intermittent spasms of injudicious online shopping I paid $75 for an original copy of The Hotel Wentley Poems, published by Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press in 1958; the artifact’s appeal is divided almost exactly evenly between the aesthetic and the historical.
