Just an Accident

I tell all my students, whenever I am fortunate enough to have some, that they need a fiction reading habit. I won't go here into the reasons I give this advice, but an excellent example of one such reason--fortuity, and the accidental inspiration it sometimes produces--came upon me unawares recently. I will now tell you about it, distressing though this particular episode of fortuity happened to be.

I am a big A. S. Byatt fan. I think she is probably the finest living English-language prose stylist. I love reading her even when I don't manage to care much about her characters, which happens from time to time. Since I can read faster than she can write and publish (unlike some bloggers I know, who can actually write faster than I can read), the appearance of a new book by A.S. Byatt works as the opposite of what I call a petty subversion of everyday life. It is, therefore, something of a petty, or more than petty, boon to everyday life. I look forward to these, and the latest is The Children's Story, which my wife, Lord love her, gave me as a gift some weeks ago.

I don't want to ruin the book for those now reading it or who intend to read it, but it is curious how the petty subversions and the petty boons of everyday life have a way of intersecting. The petty, or not so petty, subversion of everyday life bothering me lately is the utter tanking of my book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. The book came out in September (from John Wiley & Sons), with back-jacket praise from Les Gelb, Itamar Rabinovich, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Berger, Joe Joffe, and Robert D. Kaplan. I heard unsolicited praise for the book from Dov Zakheim, Aaron Miller, Eliot Cohen and others. So I know it is a good book; all these people are not just being polite. Everyone who see it takes an interest in it -- the publisher did a fine cover. Yet it has gotten zero reviews. No newspaper will publish a op-ed related to it. Sales are terrible. I have been to three bookfests trying to hawk it, and given a series of other talks and radio interviews as well--small time stuff, to be sure--and I have found that nothing works, and so I give up. The ratio of time invested to benefit extracted is appalling. I'd rather stay home and read novels (or wait to be drawn back to my Gibson F-4).

Now, of course, the book is about exaggerations about the Jews, of which there are a lot (of exaggerations that, is, not Jews). So when I immerse myself in something where I can detect no trace of Jewcentricity, I am rather delighted these days. Having written a book about exaggeration, in which I myself very carefully did not exaggerate, took a psychic toll on me. I am therefore a little bit sick of thinking about the Jews just now--all of the Jews, some of the Jews, and any one of the Jews, including myself. What better way to heal that sickness than to get absorbed into a wonderful novel that is, to be precise about it, Judenrein! A.S. Byatt to the rescue, to my rescue, in any case.

The Children's Story begins, in Britain of course, in 1895 and ends in 1918. It is not just a story about specific children, the Wellwood children and their friends in this case. It is about a cultural phenomenon as well, wherein some upper-class British and other European do-gooders and assorted confused radicals elevated the idea of childhood as a metaphor for cleansing the human race from the degradations associated with industrial civilization. We humans need be simpler and more childlike, was the general idea, more natural and unadorned with the artificial; so we write stories like Peter Pan, swim naked and c0-ed in forest streams (there's a bit of that in the book) and otherwise indulge in fantasies and pretend to love new arts & crafts styles like Jungenstil to express, knowingly and not, that longing for the child-likely authentic.

This impulse is anything but child-like and simple as it plays out in the book, of course. It turns out, for example, that some of the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood are not exactly the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood. Many of the men in the book are real rounders, some of them sweet and almost forgivable, others quite monstrous and hurtful. But Olive has had a fling herself, back before 1895 in Munich, and one of the children in the house, Dorothy, we learn is not in fact the daughter of Humphrey, whom Dorothy had always believed was her real father until a disturbing whiskey-fueled incident and a subsequent confession revealed otherwise.

Now, without either boring you or entirely ruining the story for those who want to read (or finish) the book, let me simply say that Dorothy's real father is a German artist named Anselm Stern, from Munich. He appears early in the book, in the Wellwood's garden at a midsummer eve's party, but we do not know then about Olive and Anselm Stern's brief intimate history. We also do not yet know about Wolfgang and Leon, Anselm Stern's two sons with his German wife, who are, of course, Dorothy's half-brothers.

Now Dorothy, of all the children in the Wellwood household, is serious as a student and resolves at a tender young age to become a medical doctor and surgeon, at a time when that was no easy course of ambition for a female. She succeeds, and we readers are most glad for her. Her friend and (she thought) her cousin on her father's side, Griselda, is the most beautiful woman of the younger set in the book; they are confidantes. So it goes, on and on, in Britain and in Paris and in Munich, and the story is fine fun as the narrative weaves and wobbles its focus on a large clutch of main characters. And then, for me, Byatt ruins everything in the last few pages of a 675-page novel. She crashes the petty boon into the petty subversion, and makes a complete hash of everything. How?

Well, after having mentioned Jews only once in some 670 pages--a passing remark about a Boer War-era financial scandal in the City involving the Montagu family having frothed up some mild anti-Semitism--she suddely reveals that Anselm Stern is a Jew. She reveals this in the context of a discussion of the hair-raising goings on in Bavaria near the end of World War I, telling the reader in brief the wild but true tale of Kurt Eisner, Gerhard Landauer, and Erich Muhlsem--all of whom were Jews. And now we see it: Dorothy, the only kid of the whole lot to become a professional success, a doctor no less, is half Jewish. Griselda, the beauty, falls in love with her half-brother Wolfgang--a Jew. Everyone else either commits suicide, gets killed in the war, or in some other way melts out of the story. Damn you, Byatt! Damn you.

So I finish the book, with some sense of unease, naturally. I have been Jewcentricized, most unwillingly. But you know how it goes: Those of us who must always be reading some kind of fiction cannot survive long after finishing one novel without starting another. Otherwise we end up weeping for the death of the fantasy we have just completed, and it doesn't matter if the book has a happy ending, more or less, or a sad one, less or more. The key is that it's over and reality rushes back in, filling up more cognitive space than I wish to relinquish.

So I ask my wife, "What else is there around here to read, that I have not already read and failed to completely forget (because you see, if I have read something and managed to completely forget it, why would I want to read it again?)?" And then I see and remark about this little paperback (little compared to the hardback copy of The Children's Story) by Laurie E. King called The Beekeeper's Apprentice. "Oh, that," she says. That's just a little light summer stuff I picked up, in the summer of course, that I did not get far with. Something about Sherlock Holmes, as I recall."

So I pick up The Beekeeper's Apprentice and start into it, and I am delighted. It is preposterous by design: the author nicely pretends to be the charmed recipient of an old truck within which is there is an old manuscript written by a woman named Mary Russell, born January 1900, and the manuscript is about her "real" encounters with the real Sherlock Holmes. This is pretty rich, since Watson writes of Holmes according to Conan Doyle. So here we have King on Russell off to the side of Watson and Doyle, all about Holmes. Watson is real as amanuensis to Holmes, but he is fiction within Doyle; and now Doyle is real within Russell, but Russell is fiction within King. Isn't this fun? We get so involved, momentarily, trying to figure out what is fictional and fanciful and what is not that we forget that, layered though the authorship seems to be, it is all fictional and fanciful.

King does not write with the grace or intricacy of Byatt, but some novels don't need either to keep me happy, at least for a while. There is the lovely coincidence that where Byatt leaves off chronologically, 1918, King picks up with but modest overlap, in 1917. Some themes about women and society and the war's impact on Britain's class stratification overlap nicely, too, and entirely by accident as far as my eyes are concerned. And most important by far, there are, I say to myself, going to be no Jews sneaking around in this silly little summer book.

Ta-dum...... On page 16--just page 16, mind you--it turns out that Mary (named for Magdalene and not the virgin, we're told a few pages earlier) not only has one Jewish parent, but reads and writes Hebrew! Holmes deduces this, you see, from the shape of the ink-smudges on Mary's left thumb and second finger. Had I not been on a fairly crowded Metro car when I read this, I might have thrown the book--Dorothy Parker-style--against the nearest wall. Damn, damn, damn!

I know it's all just an accident, a minor irritating accident. I know it's not aimed at me, this mocking episode of fortuity. It's not kismet, and it's not mystical. But damn, damn, damn it is annoying.