Jim Grimsley

Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I owned this book for nearly 40 years, tried to read it a couple of times, failed to engage, put it down, and repeat. Finally picked it up again and fell into it, with some determination, only to have the old paperback fall to pieces. Ordered another copy and willed myself to finish it. This is not the kind of book that makes me rhapsodic, though I can admire the complexity of it and the writer’s complete engagement with language. There were parts of it, like Pimber’s death, that were moving and beautiful. The late chapters also struck me as strong and compelling; the search for Pimber and the recovery of his body comprised a drama I admired. But the words. I do not care for wordplay that is an end in itself, nor for puns, nor for stream of consciousness as this book represents it. When I compare this to Virginia Woolf it appears messy and erratic. Her idea of consciousness is a stream of awareness that touches on many things lightly in the space of a moment. Gass’s idea of consciousness is so forced that a person would have to spend all energy on having this kaleidoscope of thoughts in order to bring it off, and such a person would collapse from exhaustion. As this book does, for me. The very long first chapter of Furber’s section nearly made me abandon my reading; but I had bought a new copy and knew that it was a revered novel, and so I pushed on. That chapter is the low point of the book for me. What follows restores some sense of drama. But what Gass offers in the way of story he takes away, as if he is afeared someone will catch him committing the sin of having a plot. Omensetter is not convicted of Pimber’s murder, the son does not die, the revered Furber has his change of heart as easily as anything, and the whole exercise fades into gauze. This is a great book, and I am aware of that, but no book appeals to everybody.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This epistle of Hadrian to his successor, imagined and composed by Marguerite Yourcenar, is a perfect book in very many ways, yet proceeds so quietly about its work that the author nearly vanishes. She submerges herself in the persona of Hadrian and speaks with authority in a voice that is easy to imagine as his own. The writing is never showy; I have read that it is very like good Latin in its rhythm and its austerity; it is rendered into a beautiful English by Grace Frick, who worked in collaboration with the author. This is the sort of book I would like to have written, though I lack the confidence of an historian to speak on behalf of an emperor who ruled a goodly portion of the known world. Yourcenar, however, is equal to the task. Her Hadrian has the wisdom we would wish for in a king of the world; he also has the cruelty, though it is not the malice of a Caligula or the madness of a Nero. There is a temptation to speak in platitudes about the decisions that are forced onto such a person by the fact of immense power over others; to do so would be to cheapen a reflection on this novel, which is so wonderfully composed that it avoids such pitfalls. Hadrian simply speaks, and since his audience is the person he has trained to be his successor, he lays bare all that he has become in the course of his long reign. His love of men in preference to women is a feature of the book but one could not call it a romance. I don’t think it’s appropriate to use the word “gay” in connection with him. The concept of sexual identity of this kind did not exist in this world. There was simply what he wanted and what he did not want. There is also, in this depiction of him, the measured control of the man, who could have had anything he wanted and as much of it as he could command, and yet lived in a kind of balance. If your only image of Rome is that of endless decline – a word which always crops up in connection with imperial Rome thanks to Gibbons – then this book offers a convincing contrast. A moving meditation on history, power, and heartache.

The Planter’s Northern Bride by Caroline Lee Hentz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It is instructive, particularly in 2020, to read a book like this one, written as a refutation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; in this syrupy novel about a northern woman’s marriage to a fabulously wealthy planter I was treated to the actual thinking of a writer who intended to do her best to defend the system of slavery. Her efforts are clear on every page. The planter in question is presented in terms of absolute, unquestioned nobility. The innocent northern girl whom he marries comes from a family of inept abolitionists whose views on slavery are presented as childishly naive. There are passages of the book that are achingly awful: a slave’s protestation of the fact that she hates her own looks and wishes she looked like a white woman; the freeing of a slave that is depicted as a callous kidnapping, ending in the slave’s return and her pleas to be returned to the good life of being human chattel; a slave rebellion by slaves who just don’t know any better, which is put down with the tenderest admonitions by the lordly master. It is a thoroughly sickening read, but if you want to know the attitudes that shaped so-called benevolent masters, here you have it, the whole deck of cards laid out for your inspection. It amazes me that the author cannot see her own false ideas. But the blindness of the writer is complete. What recommends her as a novelist is the thoroughness with which she documents the self-deception of a whole society, lost in a view of the world that reaffirmed its members in their collective wrongdoing.

He felt he was in the bell jar, too. Separated from the world by the thin surface of a screen. The world flashed onto the screen all day, one image after another, and he was trapped in front of it, witness. A white woman is screaming at a black woman in a seven eleven. A black man is dying under a white cop’s knee. Images of the past are everywhere, statues from an old war that people were tearing down, and there was a lot of noise about what was history and what was not. Every day there was a new trend to follow but it led to nothing more than a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and another night in which he slept restlessly and dreamed about finding his socks. He could never find his socks. Packing for a trip, dashing frantically here and there, because somebody was about to leave on a journey – he was about to leave on a journey – and he could not even find his suitcase, and he was not sure where he had parked his car. Was it here, or here, or here? And finally he would wake up and remember it was his life, he was in bed in his room, his car was parked outside in the correct space, and another day had begun. Already the computer was scrolling with all the horrible things that had happened in the world since the last time he sat in front of the screen. Easing himself into the seat. Letting the whole mass of it rise over him again.

The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The strangeness of Cordwainer Smith as a writer only deepens when one reads the story of Paul Linebarger, who is the person behind the pseudonym. The stories of Smith are exotic, a glimpse into a distant future, an imagining that humans go on and on for tens of thousands of years, iterating ourselves into a civilization in which there is not quite a government but in which there is definitely a structure, an instrumentality of humans that stands behind everything else, that intervenes when necessary, with a brutal swiftness, for reasons of its own. Yet in stating this so directly I violate Smith’s own method of telling a story, which is more in tune with the fable, and in which we glimpse the instrumentality in dozens of ways throughout the short stories here. It is as if Olaf Stapledon developed an interest in narrative and wrote fiction rather than the sweeping future histories he created. All the stories here are classics of early science fiction; he was revered by his contemporaries. They are dated in their approach to women, which is their worst aspect. But character was not what Smith was about; he wrote big, strange ideas into his stories, in language that evoked a distance in time, a richness of future in which men become something else. His ideas, though, are singular. “When the People Fell” is a good example. The story is about China dropping millions of its people onto Venus in order to colonize it -literally dropping them out of the Venusian sky, knowing that most of them would die, but aware that this brutal act would create a great leap forward in which the planet would instantly become Chinese. Yet the act is simply presented, in detail but without a speck of emotion other than bemusement, as if a godlike historian were recording it all. Reading his work in a body, one sees the threads connecting them all, rich and intricate and hard to describe because they exist in themselves so fiercely, so densely. His fiction predicts the work of Philip Dick, echoes with Kafka at moments, but stands alone in terms of its elements. At its heart it is, in fact, work that is preoccupied with Christianity; Linebarger, for all his mastery of psychological warfare, knowledge of realpolitik, and vast experience among the powerful, was devout. Like all the other elements of his writing, the spiritual moments are small, vivid, and uncanny.