Christmas dinner with the family was enjoyable, it’s true. But how much more enjoyable might it have been if I’d come prepared with a few holiday-ready lines from Long Day’s Journey?

To brother-
You look weak, lad. You better take a bracer.

To brother-in-law–
Keep your damned anarchist remarks to yourself or, equally good, Keep your dirty tongue off Ireland.

To father–
What do you know of the value of a dollar?

To 92-year-old grandmother–
For God’s sake, forget the past!

Truisms to share when conversation lags–
Fog: It hides you from the world and the world from you.
Snoring: Everybody healthy snores. It’s a sign of sanity.

When someone turns down a drink–
I wouldn’t give a trauneen for a teetotaler. They’ve no high spirits.

Whenever your glass is filled–
I never in my life had to be helped to bed, or missed a performance.

When someone mentions an author (substitute names as appropriate)–
Your dirty Zola! And your Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was a dope fiend!

When someone declares they’ve had enough to drink–
Thanks for telling us your great secret.

When brother leaves the room–
Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself.

When sister says anything–
The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

When someone opens a gift from you; after a pause–
Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows.

When you open your gift; after a pause–
A poor thing, but mine own.

End of evening, when putting on coat:
Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely?

I guess there’s always next year . . .

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Just in time for the holidays, and all those hours of enforced merriment with family members, the TLS has a great piece by Tony Kushner on Eugene O’Neill. I was especially struck by a passage Kushner quotes from Mary McCarthy, which indicts Chicago heroes Farrell and Dreiser along with O’Neill:

O’Neill belongs to that group of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat. What they produce is hard to praise or to condemn; how is one to judge the great, logical symphony of a tone-deaf musician? Pulpy in detail, their work has nevertheless a fine solidity of structure; they drive an idea or a theme step by step to its brutal conclusion with the same terrible force they have brought to bear on their profession. They are among the few contemporary American writers who know how to exhaust a subject; that is, alas, their trouble. Their logical, graceless works can find no reason for stopping, but go on and on, like elephants pacing in a zoo. In their last acts and chapters, they arrive not at despair but at a strange, blank nihilism. Their heroes are all searchers; like so many non-verbal, inarticulate people, they are looking for the final Word that will explain everything. These writers are, naturally, masters of suspense.

That’s in many ways dead-on, I think — and you can see how these authors strangely foreshadow both Bellow’s garrulousness and Beckett’s silences.

I have a soft spot for O’Neill — maybe because I’ve seen some exceptionally good productions. The revival of Iceman in 1985 may be one of the best things I’ve seen on stage, though Robards has never completely dislodged Lee Marvin from my mind (I saw the movie version first).

But the funniest, scariest, most moving O’Neill production I’ve seen has to be the Long Day’s Journey staged by the Stratford Festival of Canada in the early 1990s. (A very good version of this production was broadcast on PBS and is still available on video.) As Kushner points out, what McCarthy sees as “quaintness” in O’Neill’s dialogue is really, properly delivered, a lively, highly informal vernacular that will surprise you if you expect — and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t — something stiff, dry, formal, “classical.” The team at Stratford got it right.

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Jessa’s post today reminded me that 2003 has been a fantastic year for big, hardcover poetry collections. Here are the ones that caught my eye:

Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations
Ted Hughes, Collected Poems
Anthony Hecht, Collected Later Poems
Robert Lowell, Collected Poems
Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore

To Jessa’s question about “who will buy these massive collections of poets’ work,” I’d offer this suggestion: The collected Pound, Hughes, Hardy, Yeats, etc., are, for someone who writes, a little like what Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, James Beard, The Classic Italian Cookbook , etc., are for someone who cooks: a good source of ideas. And I’d argue that, with “collected poems,” as with cookbooks, size is almost always a virtue.

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* Ever Known an Epidemic to Be Funny? The new ad for Miller Lite is creepier if you’ve read Saramago’s Blindness.

* Your Copy Editor Hates You. Novelist Jonathan Dee had some interesting things to say about narrative in video games in his New York Times Magazine cover story last weekend. But then they gave his article a title swiped from another writer who knows the territory so much better. (The article’s web title is different than the print version.)

* Archive Shrink. Speaking of the Times, I just noticed that the free archive for the Book Review now only goes back to 1996, instead of 1980 as it originally did. When did that happen?

* All Creatures, Limp and Amorphic. You gotta listen to the Nabokov clip on the BBC 2 site. (via Maud.) Hearing a favorite author’s voice for the first time is a little like meeting a long-time pen pal. Full text of the interview is here.

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Here’s a confession: between blog entries, even when they are separated by days or weeks, I think of almost nothing else except my last entry.

So I’m watching the BBC Dickens bio last Monday — which I loved, though it was overlong — and I’m thinking, what is it about this Saunders guy? I think the reason I connected Saunders and Dickens is that Saunders’ subject matter in the New Yorker story is very Dickensian: the almost operatic tribulations of people at the lower end of the economic scale. Whether this is typical of Saunders’ work, I don’t know. From what I’ve read about his work — including a good discussion of his two story collections, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, on Bookninja — it tends more towards fantasy than reality, but he certainly has a touch for the latter, judging by Christmas.

Which brings me back to the subject I’ve been hedgehogging about lately: realism. (Ok, I admit: closely related to my last obsession, the relationship between a writer’s life and work.) This preoccupation has been encouraged by reading Auerbach’s Mimesis, reissued this year.

There have been two very thoughtful, very different reviews of Mimesis in recent months: George Steiner in the TLS on Sept. 19 (not online), and Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books on Oct. 23 (available here). Both refer to the romantic story behind this extended look at realism: Auerbach, a Berlin Jew compelled to flee his post as chair of Romance studies at the University of Marburg in 1935, ends up in Istanbul where, relying only on the local public library, he writes one of the monuments of 20th century literary criticism.

Auerbach’s approach is to analyze brief passages from a wide range of works, and even today it’s amazing to look at the scope of works he addresses. Each is treated separately, in chronological order from ancient to modern, in one of the twenty chapters of his book:

Homer, The Odyssey
Petronius, Satyricon
Ammianus Marcellinus, Book15
Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks
Le Chanson de Roland
Chretian de Troyes, Yvain, or, The Knight with the Lion
Mystere d’Adam
Dante, Inferno
Bocaccio, Decameron
Antoine de la Salle, Le Reconfort de Madame du Fresne
Rabelais, Book II
Montaigne, Essais
Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
Cervantes, Don Quixote
La Bruyere, Les Caracteres
Abbe Prevost, Manon Lescaut
Schiller, Luise Millerin
Stendahl, The Red and the Black
The Brothers Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

When I think of Flaubert’s comment: “What a scholar one might be, if one only knew some half dozen books well,” I think of Auerbach’s as one of those books.

But back to the connection with Dickens and Saunders: Eagleton points out that what concerns Auerbach is not, or not merely, realism as a “technical, formal, epistemological, or ontological affair,” but as a moral, political, and historical matter. To write realistically is to address ordinary, daily life. As Eagleton writes:

Perhaps it is impossible for us to re-create the alarming or exhilarating effect of a few pages of Daniel Defoe on an 18th century reader reared on a literary diet of epic, pastoral, and elegy. The idea that everyday life is dramatically enthralling, that it is fascinating simply in its boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history . . .

I guess it’s obvious, when we think of “realist” movements in literature and the other arts, that we’re talking common, everyday subject matter. In Chicago, home of Farrell and Dreiser, that should be particularly obvious. Somehow, though, I’ve never thought much about it before reading Eagleton’s piece.

Steiner, just to add, is very good on Auerbach’s weaknesses — the reductions involved in A’s concept of foreground and background, the fact that Defoe is never mentioned, Fielding only in passing, Dickens in a manner that suggests only a superficial familiarity with his work. Still, Mimesis is a “work of exceptional stature.” What’s more, it’s needed:

We have need of it for a specific reason. Nothing is more lacking in our current encounter with and understanding of great literature than joy. The sheer wonder of the thing, the laughter even in the creation of the tragic . . . A gravely jubilant sense of good fortune inhabits this book.

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Precious little of literary interest in today’s Trib, but a Dec. 11 piece on a (largely imaginary?) revival of interest in classic literature noted that Richard Howard has two new translations coming out next year: Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant (in the great New York Review of Books Classics series), and Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (Modern Library).

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Ben Greenman interviews George Saunders, author of the non-fiction Chicago Christmas, 1984 in this week’s New Yorker (via Maud):

Can you talk a little bit about the influence of the city, both in your writing and in your life?  

I think the main influence was the extreme Chicago version of satire. The way that all emotion was communicated through irony, punching in the ribs, insults to one’s mother, etc. And the way that all of this teasing masked deep, Eastern European levels of pathos, love for life, friend loyalty, etc. Also, I love the city itself. My dad knows the city inside out, and whenever we went anywhere he would perform these great monologues, about individual houses (”. . . this is where the Gatt brothers mounted a machine gun during the ‘68 riots . . .”), and neighborhoods (”. . . used to be Ukrainian, then it took a slight tilt toward Puerto Rican, then became totally Greek, with a smattering of Dutch . . .”), and certain historical moments (”. . . this was when the stockyards were still open, and on the way to school you smelled the blood in the air . . .”). He’s a great storyteller, and he made a novel out of Chicago for me. It is such a great, mixed, sprawling place, and it seemed, when I was a kid, to contain literally everything. Plus, it is, you know, the City of the Big-Shouldered Pigs Who Make Brass Knuckles for the World, as some poet once described it.

Just a warning: Saunders’ tale is not the kind of thing you want to read to the kiddies over glasses of eggnog. It’s, you know, that other kind of Christmas story.

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Small item in Outlook India over the weekend:

So the novel isn’t dead after all. The man who declared it dead has just put the finishing touches to his latest work of fiction. V.S. Naipaul has recently packed off his post-Nobel novel to his publishers. Is this the Other Half of Half a Life?

In case the item on “Chicago-based” poet A. K. Ramanajan also caught your eye, here’s some background on him, which includes his wonderful poem Chicago Zen.

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Why does bad poetry make such great music? We don’t know, says Pierre Boulez, though it may help to remember that bad paintings make great music too (video clip):

Pierre Boulez compares music and poetry

Boulez ended his annual visit to Chicago on Sunday with a terrific concert at the new Harris Theater in Millenium Park. The contemporary program (Varese, Carter, Webern, Birtwistle) included Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop.

Have you missed Boulez again? What, AGAIN? I guess it’s your business, but I hope you’ll be able to explain it to the grandkids.

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From Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me . . . Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing . . . I just can’t get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

From the story, Mademoiselle O, Chapter 5 in SM.

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