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My Essays

Casting Sophia Coppola in ‘The Leopard’

My Twitter friend the writer Kim Askew invited me to guest post on her site Romancing the Tome last week as part of a celebration of the release of her new book Tempestuous (co-authored with Amy Helmes). I wrote about one of my favorite novels The Leopard by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa and why director Francis Ford Coppola should use it as a vehicle to redeem Sophia Coppola’s notoriously poor acting performance in his 1990 film The Godfather III.

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Hoping Sophia Coppola one day stars in ‘The Leopard’

I was honored to guest post for Kim alongside such luminaries as famed literary networker Lauren Cerand, writer and editor Edward Champion and publisher Richard Nash.

This is not the first time I’ve written about Sophia Coppola. Last year in The Millions I imagined moving to Paris and bumping into Sophia and her singer husband Thomas Mars somewhere in the Latin Quarter.

Categories
Literary

Grappling With James Joyce

Grappling with James Joyce at the beginning of the 21st Century is similar to reading Shakespeare’s tragedies or even working your way through the Old Testament—you recognize immediately you are knee-deep in cultural source material. It feels less accurate to call Joyce a modernist than to say he was modernism, for it’s clear how much of our contemporary sensibility can be traced back to this peculiar Irishman.

I recently dug into the 1959  Richard Ellmann biography James Joyce. It needs little introduction: many people consider it the greatest literary biography of the 20th Century. I recently came across a David Foster Wallace essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky biography where Wallace alludes to Ellmann’s great achievement.

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James Joyce in 1918.

And though I’m still reading about the young, unknown Joyce at this point, the book is still thick with memorable anecdotes.

In 1902 a young Joyce met the grand poet of Irish letters, W.B. Yeats, who was then 37 years old. Joyce was cocky during the meeting and reportedly talked back to Yeats, which both impressed and upset the poet. At one point Yeats mentioned the French novelist Honoré de Balzac:

“When Yeats imprudently mentioned the names of Balzac and of Swinburne, Joyce burst out laughing so that everyone in the café turned round to look at him. ‘Who reads Balzac today?’ he exclaimed.”

 

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.  --- James Joyce
Creative Commons License photo credit: UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ]

 

Joyce, rather famously, was not a believing Roman Catholic from his adolescence onward, but he was (modestly) respectful of the Church’s traditions and a great admirer of the Jesuit order, whom he studied under as a boy. He once corrected a friend who labeled him a Catholic:

“You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.”

There is also Joyce’s experience in Paris, where he was literally starving while failing to make ends meet with book reviews and English lessons. This is a letter from 1903 to his mother:

“Today I am twenty hours without food. But the spells of fasting are common with me now and when I get money I am so damnable hungry that I eat a fortune before you could say knife. I hope this new system of living won’t injure my digestion.”

Categories
Literary

A Few Gems from Henry James

To move from a contemporary novel to a book by Henry James is like leaving a meadow and stepping into an ancient bamboo grove where the surroundings are undoubtedly exquisite, but the trees are packed together, and if you’re careless, you’ll quickly lose your way.

Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903) is stocked with gems worthy of close inspection. James recommended readers stop at five pages a day, so they could adequately absorb his ambition. To be fair, the book is guilty of what critic Edmund Wilson identified as James’ tendency for only “one vocabulary and one cadence for the whole cast of moods and characters.” But what a singular cadence it is!—it’s enough to make an ordinary writer bleed with envy.

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Creative Commons License photo credit: couscouschocolat

Lambert Strether, a conservative New Englander, is sent by his fiancée to Paris to bring home her son Chad Newsome, who they fear is with a less-than-virtuous lady. While staying in Paris, Strether undergoes an awakening, and glimpses a life he might have lived while young. He ultimately counsels Newsome to remain in Paris, and urges him not to let “the moment” get away:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what HAVE you had?…What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured—so that one ‘takes’ the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is ANY time that one is still so lucky as to have…”

Paris, la Seine et Notre-Dame
Creative Commons License photo credit: antonikon

Everyone has met the married couple where the husband has checked out and handed over the business of living to his wife. Newsome’s sister Sally Pocock is the 2nd “ambassador” of the book: sent to Paris to accomplish what Strether could not. Her husband Jim is supposed to be on board, but Strether learns he’s there only for kicks:

“Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn’t care; Jim hadn’t come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally’s temper and will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of his wife’s and still further, if possible, in the rear of his sister’s.”

The city of Paris exerts as much influence on Strether as some of the characters do. James illustrates the inescapabilty of the city’s charms by its invasive presence even indoors. In two passages he begins inside and then effortlessly moves the description out onto the streets of the city:

“The glazed and gilded room, all red damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks, looked south, and the shutters were bowed upon the summer morning; but the Tuileries garden and what was beyond it, over which the whole place hung, were things visible through gaps; so that the far-spreading presence of Paris came up in coolness, dimness and invitation, in the twinkle of gilt-tipped palings, the crunch of gravel, the click of hoofs, the crack of whips, things that suggested some parade of the circus.”

And again, in a similar vein:

“The occupants hadn’t come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden.”

The lovely alliteration using the letter “c”: “the crunch of gravel, the click of hoofs, the crack of whips,” so evocative, and then in the 2nd passage, the beautiful phrase, “a summer air idles in a lonely garden.”

Categories
Literary

Advice For The Troubled

“It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice for everyone except Parisians.”  -Muriel Spark

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My Essays

My Essay in ‘The Millions’

I recently published an essay on the online literary site The Millions titled, “Paris, Wikipedia and My Middle Age Crisis.”

Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in its demolitions. For many men, the crisis begins with the fear that your Emersonian Self-Reliance is spent, or even worse, you’ve sucked so deeply on the marrow of life that you are now as penniless as Henry David Thoreau . . . Go here to read the full essay.