Destructive Affinities

Best Friends by Thomas Berger. Simon and Schuster. 209 pages. $24.00

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible." So wrote Henry Adams, that great sourpuss of American letters. This may be a little too optimistic for Thomas Berger, who has always had a special talent for darkly comic novels of suburban anomie. His classic in this regard is the 1980 Neighbors, where staid, middle-aged Earl Keese finds himself locked in a power struggle with the kinky couple who move in next door. Berger isn't cynical about the possibility of people getting along; you might say he's both fatalist and moralist, sympathetic to the people caught in the catastrophes he so neatly arranges for them, but not particularly merciful about their fates. (Poor Earl. One still remembers his dying gasp.)

Berger has written about a great many things in a career that spans over 40 years, but his latest puts him back on familiar turf. It's not perfect; there are occasional sentences that come off as either overworked or stiff, and his casual, tossed-off observations can seem more annoying than apt. But this twenty-second novel by one of the few American writers who can be called "seriously funny" is a bit like one of the many classic cars that are part of the story’s environment; it has its idiosyncrasies, but there's no denying the elegance of its design or the sheer power of its performance. It delivers a smooth ride -- right over the precipice, as only Berger can.

Outside of the fact that they're both 33-year-old trust fund babies and pals for 20 years, Roy Courtland and Sam Grandy have little in common on the surface. They're the typical odd couple, slob and snob. Roy is handsome and single, a health nut whose main obsessions are beautiful women and beautiful cars. Sam is obnoxious, grossly overweight, and a sucker for fancy gadgets he can't operate. He's also married to Kristin, who is way too pretty for him, and who doesn't much care for Roy -- friends being somewhat more forgiving of excesses than wives are. Roy and Sam are honest with each other as only friends can be; Roy thinks even their occasional lies show how close they are, since lying to a best friend is "the next best thing to lying to oneself."

While Roy piddles around selling "vintage high performance" cars that no one can afford, Sam doesn't work at all; his care and feeding is left up to Kristin, an up and coming manager at a local bank branch and a gourmet chef at home. Sam has also blown most of his inheritance on newfangled toys and bad investments, and continually hits up Roy for loans he has no intention of repaying. Roy and Kristin are Sam's co-dependents, and Roy in particular prides himself on being tolerant, good-natured, and loyal.

But Roy, the main character of the book, is also a fake; a deluded narcissist and a needy loner. He rhapsodizes about how much he loves the women he seduces, when actually all he really wants is an easy way in and an easier way out. He connects with Sam because Sam sees through him -- as do most of the women he dates, eventually -- and he can't connect with anyone else except his classic autos, which he prefers to think have a "soul." Roy is a perfect example of what he hates in his married lover, Francine: solipsism, the belief that nothing is real but one's self. In fact, all three major characters are less at home with people than with the objects of their own little worlds: Sam with his cappuccino machine and microbrewed beer, Roy with his three-liter drophead coupes, and Kristin with her salmon fillets and julienned fennel.

Cozy and reliable as the friendship seems to be, there are fissures in it, and two successive events set the course of implosion: Sam has a heart attack and winds up in the hospital, and Francine gets killed by her husband in a murder-suicide. With no one to turn to, Roy finds himself seeking solace from Kristin, who actually begins to like him; Roy as a person is different from "Sam's idea of you, which is really different," she hints darkly, "maybe more different than you expect." When Sam claims bankruptcy and begs for a massive loan, Roy's loyalties are torn between his feckless pal and his pal's sensible wife, forcing him to question just how his friendship with Sam started and what has sustained it for so long. The closer Roy gets to Kristin, the more ulterior Sam's motives begin to seem, raising questions about his own. Are these two men who swear there's no competition between them actually in a lifelong battle to get on each other's nerves and, eventually, finish the other one off?

Berger is not the type of writer who usually brings Goethe to mind, but the relationships in Best Friends made me think constantly of Elective Affinities, that strange expository novel of Teutonic romanticism. Goethe compared people to chemical agents that naturally attract or oppose, sometimes attracting in spite of opposition because of their mutual relationship with a third; one character in Goethe's novel cites the example of oil and water joined by alkaline salt. Roy and Kristin are at odds with each other at some level because they feel proprietary toward Sam, but he is also their common financial and psychological burden who takes advantage of both and keeps either from getting what he or she wants. Similarly, Roy and Sam each have something the other wants; Roy wants Kristin and Sam wants money, and Kristin is their "common opponent" -- she stops Roy from giving money to Sam, and while she'll sleep with Roy, she won't divorce Sam to marry him. Berger delicately traces all the twists and turns of a menage that promises everything and only delivers its opposite, continually jacking up the emotional ante.

"There are times when all choices must, as if by divine law, be disastrous," Roy thinks at one point, quickly consoling himself by saying those things only happen in "works of the imagination." The joke, of course, is that Roy is a character in such a work, but the point is that in both art and life personal and natural disasters do have a shape, a history, and a malefic destiny. For Roy and Sam, no bond of loyalty becomes stronger than the bond of mutually assured destruction.

This deceptively "light" and easy read digs into the hidden recesses of friendship with a remarkably subtle touch. At 79, Berger still nails the passive-aggressiveness of modern life like no other writer alive.

"If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares." -- William Gibson on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in Today's Times.

Happy 100th, George.

Girl in Cool Beans: she looks like Bonnie in the old "Trots and Bonnie" cartoon that used to appear in National Lampoon. Gangly, cropped blonde hair, pulldown knit cap on her head. She's in love with the dream of being a writer. Aren't they all. She's looking at her laptop and reading aloud her story to a long-haired freckled friend, who approvingly nods at all the key points and even high-fives her once, saying "That's beautiful! Keep it!" Encouraged, Bonnie reads her favorite parts. "This is the description of Simon," she says. "This is good." She reads something I can't completely hear and then says: "I love Simon." She resumes typing and her friend resumes writing hastily in her journal.

The thought occurred to me while driving home: as dystopias go, I think Dostoevsky's Demons is more impressive than 1984. Orwell had a model to go on, the Soviet Union, while Doestoevsky basically foresaw the horror of the Soviet Union before it even got off the ground, based largely on the mid-19th century outbreak of Nihilism. Surely Orwell read Dostoevsky's book -- could it have influenced him? Maybe, maybe. Could be interesting to compare the two.

Speaking of which, all the way through reading Best Friends I kept thinking of Goethe's Elective Affinities. Don't know why exactly, except that both books are about the arrangement of variables in which people are drawn to each other. In the Berger novel, a man and his best friend's wife are drawn to each other, mainly because the best friend is out of the picture, and the two, who had previously disliked one another, are now liberated from seeing each other exclusively through the eyes of the absent party. Berger has written such a great novel abouut friendship -- about all the deceit and repressed spite it involves -- and he manages to do it in such a light sort of way. It is lethally light, as only he can be. Jamesian scrutiny and a sureness of touch that is pure Berger. I need to sit down and just wrap my head around it.

Sent my thoughts on the Pynchon/Orwell connection to David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle, who had written a recent article on Pynchon's piece on 1984. He responds:

good catch, rodney. i hadn't seen atwood's piece, but that's pretty shameless of her. unless the insight isn't original to pynchon, and they're both paraphrasing an old idea. as a dyed-in-the-wool pynchonian, i don't really believe this, but it'd be fun to ask a dedicated orwellian to confirm just how fresh the oceania-lived-happily-ever-after hypothesis really is..

Somewhere down below I note that Thomas Pynchon's Guardian article on 1984 suggests that the past tense of the book's Appendix "suggests that Big Brother is in the past."

Here is Pynchon's quote:

... from its first sentence, 'The Principles of Newspeak' is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past. . . . In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps 'The Principles of Newspeak' serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending -- sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.

Margaret Atwood makes exactly the same point in a recent Guardian article on Orwell:

However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.

Think she read Pynchon first?

Yesterday morning I spent a fair amount of time with several stories by Hawthorne: "The Gentle Boy," "The Seven Vagabonds," and "The Canterbury Pilgrims." The best of the lot was the first, about a Quaker child taken in by a Puritan family after his father has been martyred by the community.

Hawthorne is a great writer but he's hard to stay with; the floridity gets burdensome and tends to wear a reader down. My history with him has always been that way; I pick up a book of his stories, read a few, and then am put off from looking at him again for weeks. With Melville, even when he's thrashing around, I find myself wanting to forge ahead, trusting that things will eventually get better -- maybe not this chapter, but the next one; maybe not even this book, but the next. I have more faith in Melville than in Hawthorne. And while Hawthorne's stories can crank up pretty good, they don't always have great endings. Still, I do retain an affection for Hawthorne; same with Poe, eventhough I often find myself saying a lot against both. They are props who have been there from the beginning.

I finished Redburn last week and liked it pretty well. It's B+ Melville, I'd say; a much "easier" read than Mardi, if not quite as illuminating. Redburn is, as Melville's books sometimes are, episodic. It's a tale of innocence meeting experience: the story of a naive, clean-living, pure of heart young man who takes to sea and has a lot of his romantic idealism knocked out of him. It is full of detailed and generally absorbing observations of life on sea and -- when the ship docks for six weeks in Liverpool, heart of the "middle passage" slave trade -- land. After 200 pages, you wonder when some kind of story is going to take off. But the observations are the story; it's a catalogue of cruelties on land and sea. Besides the sailor Wellingborough Redburn, the major character aboard the ship is a vicious, hateful old bastard named Jackson. He's a kind of Iago: godless, hellbent, mean for the sake of it. On land, Redburn falls in with a feckless dandy named Harry, who comes to no good; biographers such as Elizabeth Hardwick see in these passages some possible suggestion expression of Melville's own homosexual experience, which is credible, I suppose. In Redburn's travels throughout Liverpool, trying to follow an outdated guidebook of his father's, he is observant of slavery and wretched poverty -- the most touching scene in the book is one where he sees a helpless mother with two children and a dead infant in her arms. The Melville headnote in the Norton anthology I used in college said the the book was really about man's inhumanity to man. Their guess is as good as mine.

Also finished re-reading Best Friends, taking notes all the way through. More on that later.

In the realm of life, my number one goal is the proper management of printed matter, of which there is entirely too much.

David Denby in The New Yorker: "Wahlberg is naturally a B-movie artifact—he even looks a little like the old Warners’ punk, Elisha Cook, Jr.—and the notion of him as a star is turning into a talent-agency put-on." Well, it wasn't a stellar performance, as I noted, but all the way through one name kept coming to mind: John Garfield. Was he B-movie or A? Would Wahlberg be incapable of handling a movie like Force of Evil? I can't say he would be.

The Italian Job is a summer action blockbuster with better-than-average stunts and dumber-than-average dialogue. I think the lines here are some of the saddest I've heard in a movie since Gone in Sixty Seconds -- lots of elbow-in-the-ribs yuks that seem to be geared to an audience full of Barts and Homers. This Homer -- accompanied by the closest thing I have to a Bart, my daughter Kate -- thought that on the plus side it "pulsed with action," as an adman might put it, and that even at its most frequently implausible it was fairly entertaining. And it has Charlize Theron, who is riveting even when she's just waking up answering the phone. Mark Wahlberg and Ed Norton are there for the dough (and, in Norton's case, a forced contractual obligation); like the scriptwriter, they are careful not to deliver anything more than is required.

Grandiose plan: Read Norman Rush's short story collection Whites, his novel Mating, and then review his new novel Mortals, the book on everyone's lips. Can you imagine how long it would take a tortoise like yours truly to pull this off?

Started re-reading Best Friends at lunch, pen and pad at hand -- felt so much better that way. I think it's the only way to read books and I ought to read every thing that way. Also read the Free-Times, which had my own shortened version of my Byron review; I think the editor played with it a bit but it would probably be too depressing to match the two.

Every now and then I find myself morbidly attracted to the Crosby, Still and Nash song "Our House." I think it falls under the "corny but great" category -- very "cozy," to quote the song, but it carries a bold whiff of romantic hippie idealism, and at least one ever so slightly artistic line:

Such a cozy room, the windows are illuminated
By the evening sunshine through them,
Fiery gems for you, only for you.

Okay maybe it's only artistic by pop standards. The "fiery gems" phrase is a nice little detail, a nice little glittering gem woven into the homey tapestry.

My goal today was to write about Thomas Berger's new novel Best Friends, which I find most impressive and which is his best in years. But I continually find myself in a bit of a fog when I sit down to write a review unless I've read the book twice; I don't really feel like I've mastered the book until I've given it extra-special attention, taken notes, thought hard. This is why so many of the little opinions I drop off here aren't pleasing to read; they're wispy, insubstantial, lacking in thought. I'm no good at blogging, I've decided; well, not so much "I've decided" as "I've always known, but pretended otherwise." I don't think quickly enough, I don't form opinions with timely exactitude, and much as I may wish it to be otherwise I innately reject the whole idea of "first-draft" thinking. That's for people who are more tuned in, more plugged in, more aware, more in touch, you might say -- I'm none of those things, and when you try to be it makes you a little absurd in reflection.

Writing takes forever and you have to believe in it apart from whether it ever gets read or not -- which, I know, may sound silly, but I think that's what it comes down to. When I say this, I feel a little like the wife in a free-love relationship, who keeps telling herself she needs to "get over" her jealousy when her man strays; triumph over the natural instinct, and you'll be free, supposedly. Never works, but we plug on, boats against the current.

Lost in La Mancha

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary Lost in La Mancha, the story of Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to put Don Quixote on screen, has to be one of the best documentaries about film-making ever made. It's about the fragility of film-making; not so much about the artistic struggles but the financial and logistical ones, and, in this case, the insurmountable, unplanned difficulties that can sink a production altogether.

Those difficulties can be summed up quickly: herniated disk, F-10s, and act of God.

As you might expect, Gilliam's film wasn't a straight version of the book, but a rather imaginative one titled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; it was to feature Johnny Depp as (if I remember correctly, and I can't claim I do) a modern-day advertising salesman who somehow gets thrown into the story. For cost reasons alone, odds are against the movie from the start, but Gilliam and his producers manage to patch together a somewhat wobbly international consortium of backers. The French actor Jean Rochefort is casts as Quixote; he absolutely looks the part, and spends seven months learning English to play it.

Rochefort no sooner arrives than he becomes ill with a prostate problem that makes horse-riding all but impossible. When he flies back to France to see his doctor -- for a stay that becomes increasingly longer -- Gilliam and crew try to make do by shooting some desert scenes with Depp. Then things really start falling down: shots are ruined when huge NATO planes fly overhead, and a flash flood turns into a mudslide, with the crew struggling helplessly to keep their equipment from floating away. The rain ruins the look of the landscape, making further shooting impossible for weeks. The roof, in other words, falls in on the project.

I don't recall ever having seen a documentary that pulls you in so closely into all the fascinating details of pre-production: storyboarding, script conferencing and run-throughs with actors, digicam screen tests, and the close working relationship a director has with his first assistant director. Fulton and Pepe manage to make all this look intensely interesting, and they pull together a broad, all-encompassing picture not only of the Cervantes novel but also what Gilliam was trying to do with it. The story, the filmmakers remind us, plagued Orson Welles for ten years of his life as well, in another production that also went nowhere. (Oddly enough, the film does not mention another sterling example: the Oscar-winning screenwriter Waldo Salt, who obsessively worked on a Quixote script for well over a decade, and died without seeing any results.)

I'm not a huge Gilliam fan, and the movie is very much of a love-letter to him: frame after frame is filled with his huge giddy face and mad eyes, in which we are presumably supposed to read the glint of true genius. (I can't decide if Gilliam was playing up to this idea or merely mocking it by wearing a T-shirt that reads "Fellini" in big letters.) A closing note lets us know that Gilliam is still hoping to get the picture re-financed and somehow made; you can't help but hope that he succeeds, and that this documentary -- superb as it is -- won't be his epitaph.

Father's Day gift: How the West Was Won, the 3-CD Led Zeppelin live set from 1974. It's everything a committed Zephead could possibly ask for and I listen to it regularly. The best gift though was a fine, funny little poem Kate wrote. I'm toying with the idea of posting it.

Oh, and I started Redburn recently. Very easy, enjoyable read about a naif who takes to the sea; the kind of story that has been parodied many times, most recently with Cabin Boy.

I'll be posting a review sometime later on Thomas Berger's new novel Best Friends, his best book in years. Berger has been spotty of recent, but when he really digs his subtle claws in domestic life there's no one like him, no one better at limning the skull beneath the surface, no one better at tracing the passive-aggressiveness at modern life. A terrific book about two men, best friends and total opposites, who wind up trying to destroy themselves and each other -- very neatly, very succinctly raises questions about what we talk about when we talk about friendship. More later.

You don't always know how you feel about a book until days after you put it down. Mardi has a nice, dense integrity to it, looking back over it -- a mad book but a forceful one, a powerful one. A sleeping dragon that stirs somewhere in the middle and roars. I don't really have my finger on it but I think the book has influenced me in some way. Or maybe I just like the way it sails through my head. I want to read it again and take notes and say a lot more than I have because what I've said is not substantial. Is it too much to call it a rigorous work of the imagination? Maybe rigor isn't the word, because it isn't tight or taut, exactly. A work of the imagination that rolls over you, regardless of its lack of rigor. It smothers you. Anyway. I've reflected on it a lot since I read it, with particular attention to its allegorical interest; the way Melville erects arguments of faith versus doubt, the imaginative way he takes American poilical battles over slavery and plays them out among a group of natives -- and I like the unresolved ending, too, or nearly unresolved. It's emotionally satisfying for some reason. I want to say more about this book and should probably stop until I get a better grip on what I'm talking about.

Turns out Van Doren wasn't very far seeing. Have you ever read anything as stupid as this?

"Although he did not cease to write at once, Moby Dick seems to have exhausted him. Pierre (1852) is hopelessly frantic; Israel Potter (1855) is not markedly original; neither are The Piazza Tales (1856), and The Confidence Man (1857)." Take or leave the other opinions, but anyone calling The Piazza Tales unoriginal is a bloody fool. It included "Bartleby" -- one of the greatest short stories ever written by an American -- and "Benito Cereno," a superb short novel. Unoriginal -- puh-leeze.

Drinking With Herman

"One of the strangest, maddest books ever composed by an American," says Carl Van Doren of Melville's Mardi, and it is that. It's an episodic story a bit in the mold of Typee, as Van Doren notes: set in a Polynesian seascape, in which a lone voyager takes to the sea, gets restless, and strikes out on his own. Our protagonist is joined by a Nordic Sailor named Jarl and, eventually, a couple they meet on what appears to be a deserted ship, Samoa and Aleema. Along the way they encounter a group of savages who are about to sacrifice the beautiful maiden Yillah, whom they also rescue.

The five eventually land on the archipelago of Mardi -- whose geography I have not quite mapped out in my head, and which if I'm not mistaken is ruled by King Media -- where the protagonist is recognized as the god Taji. Yillah suddenly goes missing, and a search for her ensues amidst the surrounding area -- a long and somewhat loping search in which Melville gazes and dreams and thinks and philosophizes on a great deal.

At the risk of sounding foolish, let me suggest here that there are two types of Melville: inspired and not. When he's off, he tries to pull words out of nothing to describe not much. When he's on, well, fasten your seatbelt: the rocks are knocked away by a flood-tide of words, of images, of pure language, and as a reader I find myself getting drunk on his prose, on his raw enthusiasm, even getting a bit senseless. There are times reading this book when I suddenly notice I don't quite know where I am or I forget who is who, but it's not confusion that's the primary sense -- the interest is still there, as well as a kind of rapture.

An example. This morning I had three hours to kill while my daughter took her SAT in Columbia. I was reading Mardi when I suddenly realized I didn't know what the hell was going on. It was Chapter 84 -- "Taji sits down to dinner with five-and-twenty kings, and a royal time they have" -- so I read it again and again, a little more enjoyably each time. Here is it's fascination: you find yourself getting drunk on a scene of drinking. It's one of the richest scenes of abandon I've ever read; one of the richest and most intricately detailed. The scene is a piece of literary ... porphyry!

Okay, here's the set-up. The search for Yillah has taken the group to the isle of Yuam, ruled by Donjalolo, who is basically imprisoned on the island by an old curse that prevents kings from ever leaving. The search is through and the group is about to leave but Donjalolo begs them to stay; he has prepared a banquet in their honor, with other kings from neighboring isles -- Donjalolo is starved for companionship and tales of other places, and so he treats his guests well.

The banquet is in the mouth of a grotto, known as the House of the Afternoon, beneath a waterfall, in the valley of Willamilla. There is drinking; wine of choice, Morando: "A nutty, pungent flavor it had; like some kind of arrack distilled in the Phillipine isles. And a marvelous effect did it have, in distilling the crystallization of the brain; leaving but precious little drops of good humor, beading round the bowl of the cranium."

The feast begins. Now get this, it's wonderful: a "porphyry-hued basin" is brought out, about the shape of a bathtub, filled with water from the cascading fall. The kings all gather round it, and plates of food are set sail on the water. The menu: "wild boar meat; humps of grampuses; embrowned bread-fruit, roasted in odoriferous fires of sandal wood, but suffered to cool; gold fish, dressed with the fragrant juices of berries; citron sauce; rolls of the baked paste of yams; juicy bananas, steeped in saccharine oil; marmalade of plantains; jellies of guava; confections of the treacle of palm sap; and main other dainties; besides numerous stained calabashes of Morando, and other beverages, fixed in carved floats to make them buoyant."

Donjalolo sits at the head of the basin, surrounded by other kings; Melville compares this tableaux to Mont Blanc and the basin to Lake Como: "flanked by lofty crowned heads, white-tiared, and radiant with royalty, he sat; like snow-turbaned Mont Blanc, at sunrise presiding over the head waters of the Rhone; to right and left, looming the gilded summits of the Simplon, the Gothard, the Jungfrau, the Great St. Bernard, and the Grand Glockner."

Everyone pigs out. The food finished, fruit is set sail on the basin, and the wine never stops flowing.

Taji is given Marzilla, a wine as old as Donjalolo's forebear from generations back -- a wine so old it has turned to syrup, and which, Taji is told, only gods like him can drink:

"This special calabash was distinguished by numerous trappings, caparisoned like the sacred bay steed led before the Great Khan of Tartary."

Everyone gets rip-roaring drunk -- "But ha, ha, ha, roared forth the five-and-twenty kings -- alive, not dead -- holding both hands to their girdles, and banging out their laughter from abysses; like Nimrod's hounds over some fallen elk."

Nimrod -- what a nice touch.

Taji likes getting drunk with kings -- "If ever Taji joins a club, be it a Beef-Steak Club of Kings!"

Donjalolo's party concludes with a party of dancing girls who lock arms and dance about the waterfall.

"Round the cascade they thronged; they paused in its spray. Of a sudden, seemed to spring from its midst, a young form of foam, that danced into the soul like a thought. At last, sideways floating off, it subsided into the grotto, a wave. Evening drawing on apace, the crimson draperies were lifted, and festooned to the arms of the idol-pillars, admitting the rosy light of the even."

The kings recline and "two mute damsels" arrive, one applying scented waters to their fevered brows, one daubing away moisture with a napkin. Incense burns.

"Steeped in languor, I strove against it long; essayed to struggle out of the enchanted mist. But a syren hand seemed ever upon me, pressing me back.

"Half-revealed, as in a dream, and the last sight that I saw, was Donjalolo; -- eyes closed, face pale, locks moist, borne slowly to his sedan, to cross the hollow, and wake in the seclusion of his harem."

The next chapter over, Taji has still not quite recovered: "...the thought of that mad merry feasting steals over my soul till I faint."

Ether. Melville's prose is like snorting ether.

"...together they had all got high, and together they must all lie low."

Every now and then, I discover a hard nugget of common sense that isn't always perfectly welcome, especially if 1) it makes me too self-conscious and 2) I feel certain I'll never forget it. Like this quote from an interesting 1973 Paris Review interview with Anthony Burgess:

Interviewer: Are there any limits that you think an author should observe in the language he uses to present controversial subject matter ?

Burgess: My aversion to describing amorous details in my work is probably that I treasure physical love so highly I don't want to let strangers in on it. For, after all, when we describe copulation we're describing our own experiences. I like privacy. I think that other writers should do what they can do, and if they can spend—as one of my American girl students did—ten pages on the act of fellatio without embarrassing themselves, very good luck to them, But I think there's more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness. When I wrote my first Enderby novel I had to make my hero say "For cough," since "Fuck off" was not then acceptable. With the second book the climate had changed and Enderby was at liberty to say "Fuck off." I wasn't happy. It was too easy. He still said "For cough" while others responded with "Fuck off." A compromise. Literature, however, thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties.

(Italics, immortally, mine.)

Compliment of the day: "For all I know hot writers - and you are one - think it's cool to retain a few egregious grammar and punctuation errors." Thanks, Mary -- I fixed the Nineteen Eighty-Four slip. Proceed, precede; I'm never sure how to spell neccessary or occurred either, but I have a feeling you'll tell me.

I had a most Orwellian time last week. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time and Animal Farm for the second time.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not at all my kind of novel, and that's why I've avoided it for so long. It’s a novel of ideas, and it doesn’t resist using a megaphone to get them across. It's is one of those books I've never gotten around to because it's so well-known; ditto it's dystopian peers, Huxley's Brave New World, Kafka's and just about anything by Camus or Sartre. (They’re in this class too, aren’t they?) These are books whose reputations precede them, that worm their way into the general consciousness without ever being read. Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, says the best books are ones that tell you what you already know, and to some degree readers already know this one before ever picking it up. I knew enough about it, too, to know I wasn't going to love it, but I kind of do. It’s a book that reminds you on a regular basis that it's not a work of art, that it's not some self-reflecting, multi-layered, intricately structured thing (like, say, Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov’s masterpiece) which can withstand many readings. Orwell was a journalist, and his aim was to deliver as hard a punch to the solar plexus as possible. He wanted to scare the shit out of leftists who were still looking a little too kindly toward our World War II pal Uncle Joe Stalin and -- like Izzy Stone and Lillian Hellman and Edmund Wilson and God knows how many other liberals of the head-in-the-sand variety -- were turning a blind eye to the fact that he was a fucking monster; not a bad goal. Orwell's achievement is give you a few sweating hours in the mental and moral cage of totalitarianism.

You probably know about the book but I'll take a quick run at the plot anyway. The world of the book, of course, is that of Big Brother, ruling government of Oceania, one of three superstates in Orwell's dystopic future, the others being Eurasia and Eastasia. We open on a grimy evening in Airstrip One, formerly known as London. Winston Smith, a government scribbler in the language of Newspeak, sits in his apartment swilling bad gin and smoking lousy government-issue tobacco. Newspeak is a state language which, more than anything, is a bastardization of communication itself, an extension of the government’s behavior modification system which restricts, destroys or corrupts any word that could lead to free thought. Winston, surrounded like all Party members of Oceania by "telescreens" and government wiretaps and posters of Big Brother’s omnipresent mustachioed face -- which immediately made me think of Saddam Hussein, among others -- is about to commit the most political act of his life: confessing to a diary how much he hates the world he lives in. Writing in the dying language of Oldspeak, or what we call standard English, proves dangerously liberating and sets in motion the idea of joining the ultra-secret revolutionary forces.

Liberation comes first in the form of Julia, who shares his sense of rebellion and has no use for the state's sexual restrictions. In Oceania, you get your subversion wherever you can find it; for Julia, a vigilant member of the state’s Anti-Sex League, it means reminding herself as regularly as possible that the state only thinks it owns her ass. Can the state own desire, feelings, thoughts? The belief that it can’t is what binds the two lovers. Winston and Julia know they are doomed, that people never escape the clutches of Big Brother, that they’ll be forced to betray each other, and that they’ll die; that doesn’t, they assure each other, mean their love will change. Love is all they have going for them.

The two think they’ve found a sympathetic soul in O’Brien, who presents himself as a leader of the forces trying to overthrow Big Brother. As a reader you never quite trust O’Brien, but his knowledge of the system, what it takes to overthrow the system, and the fact that he even passes on to Winston the secret revolutionary text -- "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchial Collectivism" by Emmanuel Goldstein, which debunks the moral and intellectual underpinnings of Big Brother -- all lend him some credibility.

Winston’s faith is misplaced: he and Julia are both captured and O’Brien becomes Winston's personal torturer. O'Brien, who passed himself off so perfectly as a revolutionary, is the very brutal essence of Big Brother: he has perfectly mastered the art of Doublethink – that perfect Orwellian word which, like Newspeak, has since entered the Oldspeak lexicon. Doublethink means holding two contradictory ideas at the same time, which is the only way Big Brother can exist: by denying reality, or more to the point, reshaping it by Pavlovian means. Winston is tortured not just into complicity but into changing. In the battle for Winston's soul, the state wins.

Or does it? Thomas Pynchon, in a recent Guardian article, suggested that Orwell actually ends on a note of hope with the appendix, which explains the various levels of Newspeak. Pynchon suggests, reasonably, that the past tense of the Appendix suggests that Big Brother is in the past, that the secret revolution actually won -- thereby meaning, I guess, that goodness does prevail in an unseen future. I don't really buy the idea, though; it doesn't quite wash away the lasting image of Winston or those bone-chilling words: "He loved Big Brother."

The book is undeniably moving in parts.

Winston recalls how, as a starving boy, he had stolen chocolate meant for his sister, and how his mother had held the girl in her arms -- a "useless" action, but a loving one. In that recollection, Winston realizes what seperates people who are sincere and genuine (the proles) from those who are hardened and immune (Party members):

It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.

[Winston now recalls scenes from a Party newsreel of horrendous slaughter against Eurasians desperate to escape; scenes which had been greeted with laughter by the audience.]

The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.

I can't claim that same misty-eyed faith in the people that Orwell had: today, they're the ones watching scenes of brutality and yukking it up. Only now it's called "reality television."

Tricks With His Persona

Byron: Life and Legendby Fiona MacCarthy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 674 Pages. $35.00

The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons by David Crane. Alfred A. Knopf. 290 pages. $26.95

At the age of 20, the soon-to-be famous George Gordon, Lord Byron, wearily wrote to a friend that a doctor had advised him to cut back on sex. "In fact," he wrote, "my blue-eyed Caroline, who is only sixteen, has been lately so charming, that though we are both in perfect health, we are at present commanded to repose, being nearly worn out."

That very evening, he records in another letter, "we supped with seven whores, a Bawd and a Ballet-master in Madame Catalan's apartment." He considered "purchasing" a few of the ballet students, who "would fill a glorious harem." From the same letter: "I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality, I have renounced hazard however, but I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage." A few weeks later: "I have tried every kind of pleasure, and it is `Vanity.'" A bout of illness, probably venereal disease, holds him up, but not for long. "I am still in or rather near town residing with a nymph," he tells another correspondent, "who is now on the sofa vis-a-vis, while I am scribbling...I have three females (attendants included) in my custody." Two weeks later, he would brag of seducing both "the 'chere amie' of a French painter in Pall Mall, a lively Gaul -- and occasionally an Opera Girl from the same Meridian." He would also tell of going out for a night on the town, getting in a fight, then recovering, along with ten of his pals, at a "House of Fornication."

Women, women, women -- the great English Romantic poet's short life was full of them, but how much of all that was just PR? A few of the above letters were written to a minister, after all -- who could have resisted a little embroidering for the sake of shock? Long before anyone coined the phrase "cult of personality," Byron had it down cold. He knew the art of shaping his own myth. James Dickey, who knew how that game was played, was rather admiring when he said Byron was the kind of "enormous phony ... who makes the public take him on his own terms, the terms of his persona." Byron warned against reading too much of him into his poems, but the poems begged you to do otherwise, even when they weren't frankly autobiographical. Byron also claimed to draw from personal experience; where love and life were concerned, there was no substitute for the real thing. That was the source of his beef with John Keats, whose poetry he dismissed as "a sort of mental masturbation -- he is always f--gg--g his Imagination." For Byron, "The great object of life is Sensation -- to feel that we exist -- even though in pain -- it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming -- to Battle -- to Travel -- to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment."

The agitation was there from the beginning. Upon birth he inherited a wastrel father, a clinging mother, and, bane of his existence, a club foot; for compensation there were his personal good looks and a titled inheritance. As he noted of his own favorite poet, the hunchbacked Alexander Pope, it is the "unhappy dispensation of Nature that deformed persons ... are born with very strong passions. They are condemned to combat, not only against the passions which they feel, but the repugnance they inspire."

His own passions, he would later write, "were developed very early, so early few would believe me …" The age was nine, the seductress was a strange nursemaid who, according to the account of one friend, "used to come to bed with him and play tricks with his person." Privilege and later fame brought endless opportunities for him to play with others. Following the publication of the first two cantos of his breakthrough poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron said he "awoke one morning and found myself famous." For the rest of his life, fame, outrageous productivity and scandalous affairs would multiply, with no boundaries on sex or age. Aside from numerous short-term sprints, these included an openly adulterous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, not the blue-eyed one cited above, but a trail-blazing gender-bender and certified nutcase; a romp with one middle-aged society matron, Jane Harley, Lady Oxford; an almost certainly incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh; a disastrous marriage to the pious Annabella Milbanke; a fling with Claire Clairmont, step-sister of Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley's occasional girlfriend; and, in his last years, a heated but rather tender romance with Teresa Guccioli, wife of an Italian nobleman. Among young men, there were the chorister John Edleston, and Byron's page, Robert Rushton. These are just the ones people write about.

Byron died in 1824 at 36, not long after settling in Greece and lending himself and his money to the country's independence movement, yet he was as strong a presence as anyone in the arts and letters of the 19th Century. Writers, artists and musicians all fell under the spell of both his poetry and recurring speculation about his life. Poe couldn't stop quoting him. Eugene Delacroix put Byron's poems on canvas and took to dressing like him. The dark, brooding "Byronic figure" -- loner, outcast, corrupt Narcissus -- was the Big Bad Wolf in one 19th Century novel after the next.

The charm hasn't died. In the last decade alone, there have by my count been at least twelve full or partial biographies of Byron, and the last few months have delivered two new examples of both. Both have a bit of a "truth problem." Biographers of the famous dead toil under a burden of delivering fresh revelations, and long-dead subjects can make it temptingly easy to come up with unprovable theories. This is the downfall of Fiona MacCarthy's big comprehensive life. David Crane sets his sights a little lower, and acquits himself reasonably well.

MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend arrives with a handicap, as the last full-scale work, Benita Eisler's 1999 Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, set a standard that is hard to beat: zesty, intelligent, unstinting on both the art and the life. MacCarthy does, however, have a slight scholarly edge: access to a horde of previously unknown Byron letters, still under the keep of the heirs of Byron's publisher, John Murray. On the plus side, she considerably firms up the incest matter, if it needed firming up, with a letter from Byron to Augusta where he considers what place the two of them will share in hell. MacCarthy also brings some welcome skepticism to the idea that Byron fathered Augusta's daughter Medora, an idea he himself often flirted with. She also does a nice bit of detective work in determining the cause of Byron's death; not malaria, as had long been thought, but Mediterranean tick fever, possibly contracted from one of his dogs.

That, alas, is about it. With her excellent 1996 biography of William Morris, MacCarthy had a relatively fresh field of inquiry and was able to get to the soul of an artistic community -- the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood -- through one quiet, unassuming man. Byron defeats her; too large to be boring, but larger than her ability. She doesn't have Eisler's narrative flair, and the book is fatally flawed by a dull "surprise" of her own invention: Byron was gay.

Byron's sexual relationships with men are no longer news; he was outed as bisexual years ago. MacCarthy tries to up the ante by saying that Byron actually preferred men, that he was gay by nature. To prove her point she channels the ghost of Dr. Freud, relies on guesswork, and trusts the reader not to follow her argument too closely.

To start with, MacCarthy says Byron's "female attachments dwindled quickly in interest." Oh really? Like the year he spent absorbed in Lady Caroline Lamb? Like the eight months he spent with Lady Oxford? Like the year he spent married to Annabella? Like the never-ending love he had for Augusta? How about the relationship with Teresa, which continued off and on from 1819 until he left for Greece in 1823? Every one of these relationships had a thick, novelistic density to it; there's nothing "quick" about them, and only the Oxford one can be said to have dwindled. The others were terminated by violent dismissal, exhaustion, or Byron's own death. MacCarthy writes that Byron's "male loves seem to have deepened and flourished with the years." So far as I could tell, only Edleston and Rushton came close to filling this bill; were the majority of his gay liaisons anything more than predatory quickies with boys at school or in Turkey or Greece -- boys whom he treated as casually as he did actresses and chambermaids? The picture that continually emerges from MacCarthy's research, as well as from Eisler's and David Crane's, isn't of a man who saw men or women as a substitute for either. It's of a self-absorbed baby who just couldn't stop playing tricks with his person -- the trickier, the better.

MacCarthy, however, thinks that no evidence only proves her point. Byron's male friendships between the years 1811 and 1816 were "muted," she writes, and his attentions to women were all the more cruel because "he was being false to his own heart." Got that? The more women he loved and ditched, the more it only proves he's gay. Women, she says, seemed to distract him "from the homosexual instincts he was straining to repress." Some repression. Of Byron's torrid affair with Lady Oxford, MacCarthy herself writes: "He would claim he never felt a stronger passion, which she returned with equal ardor."

Still, she plugs away, rejecting common sense at every turn. When Claire Clairmont tells Byron "I had ten times rather be your male friend than your mistress," MacCarthy is quick on the draw: "Had she sensed, or heard rumors, of his homosexuality?" My guess is she simply knew that Byron's closest and most enduring male friendships -- with Shelley, John Cam Hobhouse, John Murray, numerous others -- lasted because no sex was involved (that we know of, anyway). Later, when Byron calls Venice a "sea-Sodom," MacCarthy says "It seems likely that his Venetian sexual exploits were a good deal more varied than he claimed." Her writing is full of these nagging suppositional hang-nails: lots of likelys, perhapses and surely-he-must-haves. If Byron makes homoerotic overtures, MacCarthy leaps all over it; if he doesn't, she decides he's in denial. The more women Byron scores, the more marriages he wrecks, the more children out of wedlock, the more MacCarthy simply insists he's compensating for what he really wants.

Actually, I think there's something else going on here, something MacCarthy doesn't acknowledge. Fulfilling as the Edleston and Rushton affairs may have been, both lack the one element Byron always needed from lovers: drama, preferably with a strong dose of exhibitionism. Case in point: his marriage to Annabella Milbanke.

This ill-advised pairing first came about in the hope of effectively killing off another obsessive relationship: Byron's open affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, married at the time to William Lamb, a member of Parliament. "Caro" was an all-consuming, somewhat psychotic thing, and in Byron she had met her match, famously describing him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." They knew just how to push each other's buttons, with Caro designing costumes for their erotic games and sending Byron clippings of her pubic hair. The affair, often played out in full view of the London bourgeoisie, had a strong sense of shock theater to it, and wasn't doing the families involved any favors. With the aid of Caro's mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, Byron tried breaking it off with Caro and safely landing into marriage with Annabella, a strait-laced, intellectual, and thoroughly pious cousin of William's. Nothing, alas, went quite as hoped: Caro attempted suicide and Annabella turned him down. Byron moved in with the much older Lady Oxford; as that affair ran it's course, he came in contact with his older half-sister Augusta, sorely in need of his financial help. Although the two shared the same father, they knew each other only slightly. As contact increased, so did the spark between them.

Even more than the debacle de Caro, this one had the attraction of danger. Byron fancied himself something of a connoisseur of sin, and with Augusta he killed two birds with one stone: adultery and incest. Conscience intervened somewhere in the second act, as Byron, as if to save himself from his own impulses, sought out Annabella a second time. This time she said yes, but it was too late. Even as Byron flung himself into marriage with her, he couldn't purge Augusta from his brain. After the wedding, the groom told the bride she had made the worst mistake of her life, and that if she had only said yes the first time she could have saved him. Waking up that night, seeing the red cloth of the canopy illumined by a candle, he shrieked: "Good God I am surely in hell!"

It was a hell the three principals would never escape. Not only did Byron not hide his attraction to his half-sister, he endlessly taunted his new wife with it. That wasn't all; Byron apparently also tried giving Annabella a few harsh lessons in anal sex, which -- according to which story you believe -- either horrified her or gave her so much guilty pleasure that it only underscored her lifelong bitterness toward him. After a year with him, she took their young daughter -- whom he had insisted on naming Augusta Ada -- and split, threatening him with a divorce full of allegations both nasty and fatal: not just incest, but homosexuality, which was then punishable by death.

The threat of scandal, according to MacCarthy, is what would force Byron into exile from England. David Crane's The Kindness of Sisters takes it a step further: Byron had outgrown England, and found a reason to leave. The country had long since begun to bore him, and he had "needed the the emotional and mental restraints of marriage to give the physical and claustrophobic urgency to his dissatisfaction necessary to propel him into action." Like Joyce and Ireland a century later, he required a strong decisive break with his homeland.

What really drives Crane's fascinating story, though, isn't Byron so much as the legacy of his exes and their adult children. After Byron's death, Augusta found herself financially dependent on Annabella, who reinvented herself as an evangelical shrew bent on ridding England of the curse of Byronism. Annabella made sure Augusta never stopped paying for her sins. Her ultimate revenge came through Augusta's daughter Medora, who may or may not have been sired by Byron. When Medora got knocked up by her brother-in-law, she turned in destitution to Annabella for help; Annabella welcomed the chance not only to help the poor girl, but to let her know that she was actually the product of incest, thus turning her against her mother forever. To her credit, Medora would eventually spurn Annabella too -- as would Annabella's own daughter. Augusta Ada, who inherited both her mother's love of mathematics and her father's sense of risk, had an early grasp of the principles of Sir Thomas Babbage's "analytical machine," the forerunner of the computer. Had she not been waylaid by a gambling addiction and uterine cancer, which would kill her at the same age as her father, she might have contributed more than a little literature on the subject. Quite against Annabella's wishes, Ada became both more aware and more sympathetic to her heritage, and chose to be buried by her father's side. She received some measure of immortality in 1981, when the U.S. Department of Defense developed the ADA computer language.

Crane's book is the kind of hybrid increasingly common in biographical circles today: part solid, inquisitive thoughtful history, part "f--gg--g his Imagination." Sixty pages of the book are pure invention, as Crane dramatizes the final meeting between Annabella and Augusta in the form of a play. It's not history, but the scene of these two old, broken women, facing for the last time the bitter truths about themselves and the man they shared, wouldn't make a bad movie; reading it I couldn't help but picture Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren doing the honors.

It's sometimes the case that the closer a biographer gets to the subject, the less there is to like. MacCarthy doesn't much like Byron; Crane waxes eloquent about Byron's "moral courage," whatever that means. Interestingly, both make some amusing leaps as to the literary influence of Byron and Annabella as public figures. MacCarthy sees traces of Byron in Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Crane, likewise, thinks the young Annabella was the model for the snooty Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch, and that her aged, embittered self inspired the character of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations; Eliot's journals are full of notes on Byron's divorce, and Dickens knew Annabella personally.

Part of the lingering fascination with Byron isn't just that he's a paradox -- vampire, genius, phony – but that for all that can be said against him, he apparently inspired loyalty and eternal forgiveness in those who knew him best. Take for example the abysmal way he treated his daughter Allegra, his daughter by Claire Clairmont. Byron met Claire after leaving England; she was one of Shelley's groupies and fell in love with Byron as soon as she saw him. Her subsequent pregnancy may well have been her hope of holding on to him forever, but Byron would not be held, and he couldn't stand children. He used to say he sympathized with King Herod, a joke that proved more true than he realized. By the time Allegra reached three, Byron had her dumped off at a drafty Italian convent, and – although he was only a few miles away -- never saw her again. Eisler's book reproduces, in the child's own lovely longhand, a perfectly heartbreaking plea from Allegra for a visit from papa; maybe he could take her to the local fair, and buy her some sweets. Byron chalked this up to typical childish greediness, and so far as we know never even bothered to reply. Within six months, Allegra was dead. A grief-wracked Claire, who had split from Byron and had tried wresting Allegra from the convent, called him a murderer.

This thought was nowhere near her mind when she heard of Byron's own death in Greece two years later. She wrote: " ... the Reverend the Moral and fastidious may say what they please about Lord Byron's fame and damn it as they list -- he has gained the path of eterni[t]y without them and lives above the blight of their mildewy censure to do him damage."

The sanitized TV version of A Time to Kill on CBS the other night was a real hoot; one of those times when the censor actually gave a movie a whole 'nuther dimension. The story, set in what I think is Mississippi, is about a white lawyer who defends a black man on a murder rap. He has his work cut out for him, too, as the town is against him and keeps getting anonymous calls from people who think he's a "Negro-lover." There's even a clandestine Klan meeting, where good old boys plot to "kill that Negro." Yes, they're a murderous gang of thugs, but hey, at least they don't resort to resort to hate speech ...