旧站文章

It perhaps strikes anyone who has read an ambitious historical novel  and certainly strikes anyone who has had the audacity to try to write one  that the enterprise represents the triumph of hope over experience, a suspension of hard-won, armoring caution, a Peter-Pannish faith in … well, faith. How daunting it must be to get it right: facts and artifacts, syntax and slang, costumes and customs, fads and prices, conventional wisdoms and bright ideas. And if such a novel were to aspire to be a bulging monster, teeming with extravagantly vivid characters going about their coincidentally intersecting lives with amplified voices, wearing garish clothes, committing melodramatic vices, loving (and hating) with the fervor of characters from a comic opera, then such fiction would seem perfectly ill-suited to a writer and observer known heretofore as the wised-up, sardonic, founding co-editor of the late Spy magazine. As a columnist (for New York magazine) and a radio commentator, Kurt Andersen should react to the emotions described by gee whiz like a fox to a bunny wabbit.

Andersens previous novel  Turn of the Century (1999)  is, like Heyday, lengthy and episodic, but it owes its flensing spirit to the examples of Tom Wolfes Bonfire of the Vanities and The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope It keeps a sharp eye focused on hypocrisy, self-interest, preening, sharp practice and overreaching.

Heyday, by contrast, cries huzzh for over-the-top ambition. It’s a band-concert of a novel, a parade in honor of overreaching. Set in 1848 — that hugely eventful year in Europe, the pre-Civil War United States, Mexico and the California gold fields — it never quits exclaiming, Gosh! How about that! Who’d a thunk it? It’s a mighty busy and messy story, jumping among the urban settings of Gotham, Paris, London, Chicago and San Francisco; evil is afoot and brutality the quotidian, but “Heyday” is also a sweet book, with a tropism toward redemption and happy endings.

The protagonist, connected to every subordinate character by sometimes flimsy networks of chance, is Benjamin Knowles, younger son of a newly rich Lancashire mill owner and entrepreneur. During his visit to a friend in Paris during the 1848 uprising that brought down the July Monarchy, the friend is believed to have been killed, and Benjamin is inadvertently an accomplice to the death of a militiaman. A principal weapon used during the mortal mayhem is the beak of a stuffed penguin, which suggests why at least one advance review of “Heyday” has described the novel as a “parody” of Victorian melodrama.

It is in fact an homage to Dickens, Dumas and Hugo, reviving as a central plot device the relentless quest of Inspector Javert, in “Les Miserables,” for the hide of Jean Valjean. Benjamin is hunted throughout “Heyday” by the elder brother of the slain militiaman, Drumont, a Corsican rumored to be the bastard son of Napoleon by his prostitute mother. Prostitution — in New York and San Francisco — provides a wealth of material and moral calculus for Andersen’s characters, the most successful of whom is Polly Lucking, a social-climbing nascent feminist, part-time unsuccessful actress and part-time wildly successful hooker in a New York brothel.

Benjamin, fleeing from Paris to England, and from England sailing to New York to seek adventure and fortune in the New World — looking for a “permanent place to live in a more suitably … American way. Whatever that meant” — meets Polly (unprofessionally) and falls in love. This brings him together with Polly’s brother, Duff, a survivor of the Mexican War suffering so acutely from post-traumatic stress disorder that he is not only a firefighter but a firebug, not only a sentimental idealist but a murderer. None of this, believe me, is played for laughs, although New York’s 19th-century brutality and coarseness approach comedy in their grotesqueness. (A noteworthy passage regards a fellow firefighter, Fatty Freeborn, a bully and rapist, who eats for dinner the sheep he has loved to death during the cocktail hour. Ameliorating this bestiality are two episodes detailing the attempted rescue of “imperiled pets” — a puppy bobbing downstream in one scene, a kitty trapped in a burning whorehouse in the other.)

Benjamin also falls in with Timothy Skaggs, friend to Duff and Polly, a Dartmouth dropout and black-sheep son of a New Hampshire mayor, an alcoholic daguerreotype photographer and journalist, a friend of Walt Whitman, who roams New York on the lookout for all that is novel and unexpected. This gives Andersen, seeing omnisciently through the eyes of his principal characters, opportunity to observe what’s astir, what has just been invented, what is in and what out. I was once asked by a grade-school kid whether toilet paper had been invented when I was a little boy; in much the same spirit of wonder, Andersen — generally through Benjamin or Timothy Skaggs —is besotted with the products of research masking as observation. Thus, when Skaggs was a boy “friction matches did not exist. … Photography was a fantasy. There were no one-penny newspapers, no private shops selling meats and fruits, no baseball, and precious few theaters or foreigners.”

Andersen is so keen to observe the wonders of his world that his characters seem able to see as clearly at night as at noon, and if his novel’s back is broken by the weight of its minutiae, its flow dammed by the debris of its detail, there is something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement. Like her author, Polly Lucking is agog at what’s on display at a New York department store; “she did enjoy looking at gold.”

Skip to next paragraph

Thomas Hart Shelby

Gold, and the early days of the California gold rush, dominate the final third or so of “Heyday” (a terrific title, with its multiple exclamatory suggestions dominated by an exhortation). Polly and Benjamin, Duff and Timothy — leading a wagon train of trailing characters, including the avenging hound Drumont — find their misadventuresome ways to the golden rivers of Northern California. There the four cobble together a kind of commune, and pan laboriously for just enough precious grit and pebbles to keep them at it.

“Heyday” tries also to be a novel of ideas, gamely providing mouthpieces to test theories of political unrest, economy and evolution, free will versus security. Darwin walks on as a character, and Engels enjoys the enthusiasm of Benjamin. Manifest Destiny is deplored, the notion of the Noble Savage mocked and embraced. Again and again Duff specifies that “destruction and creation are the cycle of life.” Andersen declared in a recent interview that our “elective” invasion of Iraq was on his mind as he invoked our earlier war against Mexico, and that the “commune stuff” in his novel “reminded me of the late ’60s.”

But “Heyday” roars awake, unexpectedly, while Polly and Benjamin drudge wordlessly together on the river, panning “with their labor of 20 minutes” a “decent week’s wage” back in the world. “There were still fortunes to be made in California. But now luck had become occasional and scarce, like luck in most places at most times.” Now their output, pretty impressive despite the absurdly inflated cost of living, was in decline. “Yet Ben had Polly, thank heavens. Hadn’t he? She was all that he required. Wasn’t she?”

In the end, the answer to both questions will be yes, in thunder. The dead shall be raised, the evildoers vanquished. But those questions will resonate, to Andersen’s credit.

Geoffrey Wolff, a novelist and biographer, is the Berthold Leibinger fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it. Whether it’s Ezra Pound dismissing his benefactor Amy Lowell as a “hippopoetess” or Yvor Winters accusing his friend Hart Crane of possessing flaws akin to a “public catastrophe,” you can count on the occasional bushwhacking in the land of what Horace called “the touchy tribe.”

The most recent such assault — and the most surprising in years — took the form of a 6,500-word article in The New Yorker last month by the poet Dana Goodyear, who is also a New Yorker editor. Goodyear’s subject was the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which received an unexpected (to put it mildly) bequest of roughly $200 million from Ruth Lilly in 2001. The article focuses on the Poetry Foundation’s president, John Barr, but Goodyear also takes on Poetry magazine, its founder Harriet Monroe, the Poetry Foundation Web site, legal proceedings relating to Lilly’s bequest, Ruth Lilly herself, the various objects collected by Ruth Lilly’s father (toy soldiers, gold coins), the price of real estate in Chicago and the stuff rich people wear at parties (a “crisp white shirt” or “coral lipstick,” apparently). It is a very long article.

It is also a slick production whose craftsmanship any critic would respect. Goodyear wants to portray the Poetry Foundation as a culturally conservative, slightly tacky enterprise led by a dilettantish, ex-Wall Street fat cat — “what people these days call a ‘businessman-poet’ ” — who’s itching to sell poems the way Frito-Lay sells Cool Ranch Doritos (and no, not by making them deeeeeelicious). So she fills her piece with references to advertising, buying and selling, and ostentatious wealth — John Barr has “a 25-acre estate in Greenwich,” the charity’s Web site has a budget of “more than a million dollars.” And she quotes many poets making critical remarks about Those People and All That Money (the poet J. D. McClatchy says the Foundation has an “aura of mediocrity”). Many readers might figure that Goodyear has done a fine thing by exposing this bunch of crisp-white-shirt-wearing yahoos.

The instinct wouldn’t necessarily be misplaced. After all, the Poetry Foundation does have big money, and some of Barr’s observations (regarding, say, the alleged careerism in M.F.A. programs) deserve a thoughtful response. But that response already has been made — for months now — on blogs, in print and in the letters section of Poetry magazine itself. (In the interest of disclosure, I’ve reviewed for Poetry.) As a result, Goodyear’s article has a strangely punitive cast — for example, only one poet, Billy Collins, is quoted saying anything remotely positive about the Poetry Foundation’s many enterprises. That’s funny, since those enterprises are hardly uniform. Indeed, many of the article’s critical voices have appeared in Poetry themselves (McLatchy shows up in the February issue); these writers presumably are making judgments about specific aspects of the foundation, not wholesale denunciations. Yet Goodyear doesn’t clarify. On the contrary, she leaves things blurry — at best. In an especially confusing decision, she includes a cutting remark by the writer Joel Brouwer about the marketing of poetry, and claims the comment was “an obvious … reference” to the Poetry Foundation. But Brouwer, as he confirmed by e-mail, wasn’t talking about the foundation at all. Which makes sense, of course, since Brouwer is a regular contributor to Poetry, a detail Goodyear’s readers wouldn’t know.

Similarly, the article treats a range of sometimes contradictory anxieties as if they were a unified critique. Goodyear quotes “the director of a nonprofit literary group” complaining that the foundation is trying to “take credit for things that are already going on.” By this, the director means that the foundation’s efforts to popularize poetry are only continuing a process begun by the Academy of American Poets (responsible for National Poetry Month) and the Poetry Society of America (responsible for poems on the subway). It’s a reasonable point. But then Goodyear shifts to a series of comments from poets who are upset about the very popularizing the director is describing. In combination, the criticisms become incoherent. You can complain the foundation is late to the party, or you can argue that the party itself is a mistake — but you can’t do both at the same time.

More than anything, though, it’s curious that in an article that purports to deal with the future of American poetry, Goodyear says nothing about actual poems. But maybe that’s to be expected — after all, about a decade ago, The New Yorker essentially stopped covering contemporary poetry. Granted, you’ll see the occasional collection in the magazine’s Briefly Noted section, but you’d have to go back to the mid-’90s to find a full-scale review of a poet under the age of 70. And since the turn of the century, the magazine has limited its review coverage to poets who are, so to speak, dead — with one exception, Richard Wilbur, whose “Collected Poems” the magazine assessed in 2004. Wilbur is 86.

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

The second issue with The New Yorker’s poem selection is trickier. This is what you might call the home job: the magazines widely noted fondness for the work of its own staffers and social associates. The most notorious examples were the three poems The New Yorker published by the Manhattan doyenne Brooke Astor in 1996-7 (one more than Robert Creeley managed in his whole life). Some representative lines: I learned to take the good and bad / And smile whenever I felt sad. Even more questionable, however, is the magazines preference for its own junior employees. In 2002, for instance, the poet who appeared most frequently in the magazine was the assistant to David Remnick, the editor  that assistants name, coincidentally, was Dana Goodyear. In fact, since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. Shes already equaled Sylvia Plaths total.

The problem with behavior like this is not that it violates some sacred duty of fairness (The New Yorker is a business, not a charity for whiny poets). The problem, to borrow a quotation from Goodyears article, is that this kind of thing signals a lack of ambition and seriousness that may ultimately be fatal. Poets may get frustrated with the Poetry Foundation; they may complain; they may disagree with certain projects. But the Poetry Foundation, however misguided or impolitic, hasnt given up on poetry. The question is: Has The New Yorker?