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Planetary Motions
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Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
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Thursday, November 1, 2018

Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)



The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.

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