Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter J. Kalliney

It is unfortunate that, so far as I can tell, Oxford University Press has not yet released an affordable edition of Peter J. Kalliney's Commonwealth of Letters, a fascinating book that is filled with ideas and information and yet also written in an engaging, not especially academic, style. It could find a relatively large audience for a book of its type and subject matter, and yet its publisher has limited it to a very specific market. [Update 22 Nov 2015: Commonwealth of Letters is now, and newly, available in paperback! It's still somewhat expensive, but not by academic book prices, which means that those of us who really really need our own copy can perhaps afford it. I picked it up at the Modernist Studies Association conference this weekend (conference discounts are a nice perk), and told so many people about it that I think it sold out. Which might not have been my fault. Or maybe it was...]

I start with this complaint not only because I would like to be able to buy a copy for my own use that does not cost more than $50, but because one of the many things Kalliney does well is trace the ways decisions by publishers affect how books, writers, and ideas are received and distributed. A publisher's decision about the appropriate audience for a book can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (or an unmitigated disaster). OUP has clearly decided that the audience for Commonwealth of Letters is academic libraries and rich academics. That's unfortunate.

Modernism and postcolonialism have typically been seen (until recently) as separate endeavors, but Kalliney shows that, in the British context, at least, the overlap between modernist and (post)colonial writers was significant. Modernist literary institutions developed into postcolonial literary institutions, at least for a little while. (Kalliney shows also how this development was very specific to its time and places. After the early 1960s, things changed significantly, and by the early 1980s, the landscape was almost entirely different.)  Of course, writers on the history of colonial and post-colonial publishing have traced the effects of various publishing decisions (book design, marketing, etc.) before, especially with regard to how late colonial and early postcolonial writers were sold in the mid-20th century. Scholars have toiled in archives for a few decades to dig out exactly how the African Writers Series, for instance, distributed its wares. The great virtue of Kalliney's book is not that it does lots of new archival research (though there is some), but that it draws connections between other scholars' efforts, synthesizes a lot of previous scholarship, and interprets it all in often new and sometimes quite surprising ways.

Short Notes on Various Books

One thing I love about blogs is seeing people discover books that have become so much a part of my own life that I develop the sense that everybody else on Earth has also read them, and so there's no need for me to talk about them, because we all know these are great books, right? It's nice to be reminded that this is a fantasy -- nice to see people suddenly fall in love with books I've known for a little while already.

The great and glorious Anne Fernald just posted a list of some books she's read lately with joy and happiness, and the two books on the list that I've read are ones I recommend without reservation: Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.

I first heard about Tropical Fish when I was in Kenya for the SLS/Kwani conference and Doreen Baingana was part of a panel discussion; I found her captivating. Later, a Ugandan friend (who also told me about FEMRITE) exhorted me to read the book. I did. I exhort you to do the same.

I don't remember when I stumbled upon Good Morning, Midnight -- I feel like the battered, crumpled paperback I've got has been with me for years, but I know I read it only a handful of years ago. Few other books have affected the prose of my own writing as deeply. Much of what I've written, and even some of what I've published, I could call my pre-Rhys writing -- aspiring toward a sort of lyricism that now I have little interest in. Good Morning, Midnight offers, to my eye's ear, a prose that I would rank in its stark, precise beauty with that of Paul Bowles, J.M. Coetzee, and even, to some extent, Beckett.

Meanwhile, much like Anne, I've been reading a lot without writing about it. I've felt like I either didn't have much to say about what I've read, or what I'd have to say has already been said by plenty of people. Here, though, are some quick thoughts on some of what I've read over the last few weeks:

I was looking forward to Jedediah Berry's first novel, The Manual of Detection, with so much excitement that I may have slaughtered it with expectations. Some of Jed's short stories are among my favorites of recent years, and I had high hopes for the novel, but those hopes were never quite met. It was a brisk and sometimes exhilarating read, but ultimately felt whispy to me, especially in the last third, from which I ached for much more. Much more what? I don't know. But more.

Similarly, I think Brian Evenson is one of the better contemporary American writers, and so my hopes for his new novel, Last Days, were unreasonably high. It's an interesting and sometimes harrowing book, but again I wasn't satisfied with it in the last third or so. (Matt Bell has written a comprehensive and thoughtful take on the novel here.) It's not that I didn't like either The Manual of Detection or Last Days -- I read them both, and neither ever really felt like a slog to get through -- but both left me unsatisfied, yearning for more complexity and depth and nuance and implication.

Then one day the mail brought both The Letters of Noël Coward and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. I wondered what the mail gods were trying to tell me (one friend replied, when I mentioned the coincidence: "I think it means you are either: an absurd gayist ... or a flamboyant abusrdist. Possibly both." I'll try for both). The Coward was a review copy, the Beckett a book I splurged on for myself. I tried reading the former for a bit, because I do have a certain weakness for good ol' Noël, but the letters are presented amidst a narrative of Coward's life, and I found it annoying, so couldn't continue.

The Beckett is a masterpiece of editing, a feat of scholarship, and utterly fascinating. I devoured half of the big book in only a few days (then stopped, ready to go again on the second half very soon). Gabriel Josipovici reviewed it, so I have nothing else to say.

Partly because of my "Murder, Madness, Mayhem" class, I happened to read some Robert Aickman stories and became obsessed. I had last read Aickman when I was about 17 or so, and I had hated his stories. I thought they were the most boring, pointless things ever written by any human being ever, ever, ever. Ahhh, youth! "The Hospice" and "The Stains" are now stories I am simply in awe of. I quickly hunted up the only two relatively affordable Aickman collections available on the used book market: Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils. They are full of exactly what Aickman says they are full of: strange stories. Beautifully, alarmingly strange stories.

Someone should publish an affordable paperback of Aickman's selected (or, be still my heart, collected!) stories. Tartarus Press published a two-volume collected stories, but it's going for at least $700 these days, and though I love Aickman, I can't spend $700 on him. Thus, I implore the publishing world to relieve my yearning and reprint a collection or two or eight of Aickman's stories in inexpensive editions! Someone? Anyone? Please? NYRB Books, I'm looking at you right now.....

Wanting to read some nonfiction about Aickman, I borrowed S.T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction from a library and read the fairly astute chapter on Aickman. But I have to admit, my first thought on reading various parts of Joshi's book was, "What crawled up this guy's ass and died?" I know some people have thought the same about things I've written, so I didn't hold it against him. I was curious how Joshi is perceived within the horror community, though, because his rants against writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub seem so over-the-top to me that they actually work better as humor than as criticism, and he sometimes seems to get angry at writers for not fitting into his own narrow categories, for not agreeing with his (Lovecraftian) view of the universe, for not being more, well, Joshian. He has some fascinating things to say, but also ... not. Is he the Ezra Pound of genre criticism? The Cimmerian quotes Joel Lane (whose short stories I like quite a bit):

[Joshi's] Lovecraft biography is a serious classic. Joshi’s recent book The Modern Weird Tale is a mixed bag, highly idiosyncratic and unfair, but full of good insights. His new book The Evolution of the Weird Tale, despite its grand title, is basically a collection of review articles; but it’s enormous fun and less narrow than some earlier Joshi stuff. The Weird Tale, published in 1990 and covering the weird fiction genre from Machen to Lovecraft, is ambitious and dynamic but heavy-handed and too fond of extreme statements. Behind the veils of academic objectivity, Joshi can be seen to be a volatile, short-tempered, aggressive and highly intense young man. He has mellowed a little since, though his sarcasm can still wither at forty paces.

As I prepared my class to watch an episode of Dexter, I read around in Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. and Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture by David Schmid -- both well worth reading, rich with insights.

Nowadays, I'm mostly doing research about British imperialism and its connection to mystery and adventure fiction. Fascinating stuff, which will, I hope, bring a new project to fruition...

Elegiacal

John Klima is having everyone who contributed to his anthology Logorrhea write up a little something about why they chose the Spelling Bee word they did, and then post the section of Jeff VanderMeer's all-encompassing "Appogiatura" story that corresponds with the word. Also, there is a podcast of each section of "Appogiatura". And John is going to chronicle it all via this blog post.

First, about my own word and story...

Elegiacal Origins of "The Last Elegy"

It was the only possible word for me. What stories have I written that couldn't, in some way or another, be described as elegiacal? Sorrow for the past -- that is, it seems, one of the few things my imagination is willing to fixate on for fictional ideas. Often, too, the novels and stories that most appeal to me as a reader are ones with at least a hint of the elegiacal in them, partly because memory and time fascinate me with their twinned ability to haunt us with the ghosts of all we have lost.

Also, two books had captured my mind: Man Into Woman, which is the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery; and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, a novel where spare and very straightforward prose rises to a form of lyricism that I have seldom encountered elsewhere, and where a wandering, often mysterious narrative became, for me, far more enthralling than most novels with strong plots. I knew I wanted to write a story to work through some ideas the books had brought to me, but I didn't know what sort of story I wanted to write.

And then I saw the word "elegiacal", and I knew that would provide the solution. Immediately, a character sprang into mind: a professional elegist, someone who gained great fame from writing elegies, a popular poet in the mold of Edgar Guest. I imagined that at first the fame and money would be pleasing, but then a trap, as he was known only for one thing, and the public only wanted that one thing from him.

How, though, would this story fit in with the other that I wanted to write -- something related to Lili Elbe that also gave me an opportunity to try out some of the rhythms and style of Jean Rhys? What if the elegist fled his fame, and then had to face one last request for a poem, a request he could neither honor nor ignore...

I decided to stay as true to the story and words of Lili Elbe as possible, and I wanted to evoke pre-war Germany less through specific details and more through style (hence, the place is never named; I'm perfectly happy if readers imagine different places for it). It should, I thought, feel like a story of the time -- a bit stilted, a bit melodramatic. I included some of Lili Elbe's own words and phrases, as well as some from Jean Rhys (since Good Morning, Midnight was published in 1939, only six years after the first edition of Man Into Woman came out in Germany). I didn't steal very much, and never without some tweaking, but just enough, I hoped, for flavor and a certain sort of truth. My favorite theft was a cause of death I pillaged from Man Into Woman: "paralysis of the heart", a phrase I hoped would leave itself open to many interpretations. I tried, too, to replicate the ostensibly plain prose of Jean Rhys, knowing that I lacked her skill, but hoping the exercise would, at least, prove fruitful -- what I love about Rhys is not the plainness of the style, but the way it lures the reader in, then presents gaps and ambiguities, creating beauty through absence. She gets compared to Hemingway now and then, but I think she's closer to Pinter. (Looking back on "The Last Elegy" now, in fact, I think I didn't leave enough out.)

Finally, because elegies are about not just memory, but time, I played around with the tense of the story, creating a structure and then breaking it, hoping such gymnastics might provide some subtle clues to readers, knowing full well the feat might simply be distracting.

And now, you'll see, Mr. VanderMeer was rather differently inspired by the word:

ELEGIACAL
by Jeff VanderMeer

Brown dust across a grey sky, with mountains in the distance. A metallic smell and taste. A burning.

Abdul Ahad and his sister Parveen were searching for a coin she'd lost. They stood by a wall of what was otherwise a rubble of stone and wood. A frayed length of red carpet wound its way through the debris.

"It has to be here somewhere," Parveen said. It had been a present from her uncle, a merchant who was the only one in their family to travel outside the country.

Her uncle had pressed it into her hand when she was eight and said, "This is an old coin from Smaragdine. There, everything is green."

The coin was heavy. On the front was a man in a helmet and on the back letters in a strange language, like something from another world. For weeks, she had held it, smooth and cool, in her right hand-to school, during lunch, back at their house, during dinner. She loved the color of it; there was no green like that here. Everything was brown or grey or yellow or black, except for the rugs, which were red. But this green-she didn't even need a photograph. She could see Smaragdine in her mind just from the texture and color of the coin.

"I don't see it," Abdul Ahad said, his voice flat and strange.

"We should keep looking."

"I think we should stop." Abdul Ahad had a sharp gash across his forehead. Parveen's clothes had ash on them. Her elbows and the back of her arms were lacerated from where she had tried to protect herself from the bomb blasts.

"We should keep looking," Parveen said. She had to keep swallowing; her throat hurt badly. She heard her brother's words through a sighing roar.

Now the muddled sound of sirens.

A harsh wind roiled down the brown street, carrying sand and specks of dirt.

Abdul Ahad sat down heavily on the broken rock.

Now Parveen could hear the screams and wails of people farther down the block. Flickers of flame three houses down, red-orange through the shadows of stones.

Their father had been dead for a year. Now their mother lay under the rubble. They'd seen a leg, bloodied and twisted. Had pulled away rocks, revealing an unseeing gaze, a face coated with dust.

Her brother had checked her pulse.

Now they were searching for the coin. Or Parveen was. She knew why her brother didn't want to. Because he thought it wouldn't make a difference. But Parveen felt that, somehow, if she found it, if she held it again, everything would be normal again. She had only survived the air strikebecause she was holding the coin at the time, she was sure of it, and Abdul Ahad had only survived because he had been standing next to her.

"You don't have to look, Ahad," she said, giving him a hug. "You should sit there for awhile, and I'll find it."

He nodded, gaze lost on the mountains in the distance.

Parveen walked away from him, kneeled in the dirt. She stuck her arm into a gap between jagged blocks of stone, grasping through dust and gravel, looking for something smooth and cool and far away. In a moment, she knew she'd have it.

Happy Thought for the Day

People talk about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.

As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you.

--Jean Rhys
Good Morning, Midnight