"Dear Assen Poop": The (nearly lost) art of manly name-calling

A good friend of mine recently decided that he would begin to write letters again. He has also started a collection of fountain pens -- he has ten so far, those ancient instruments that require filling up with ink and which can put indelible stains on one's seersucker sleeve. I'm only assuming he hasn't adopted such sartorial splendor as of yet. If he does, I'll be the first to tell him he's carrying things a bit too far.

His decision to take pen in hand, though, is understandable. There's a permanence to the ink-written page that the vagaries of cyberspace can't yet match: if there's a there, there, it can be accessed and downloaded, but it can't be tear-stained as a letter.

I wish him great success, and look forward to his future musings. I certainly hope his new avocation leads my friend to enjoy new ways of personal expression. I was certainly amused to read his post-script, tacked on the very last line as an afterthought: "Do you read all those books you list on your blog?"

Well, it is the blogger's unfortunate curse to appear as though he does nothing but read, or report on nothing but what consumes him; I've been to math and IT websites that appear to be nothing but equations and problem-solving that leave me mystified. Reading literature, like understanding math, is years' worth of cumulative effort, and leaves a lasting impression, like layers in a rock formation worn by river water.

So much of writing is submerged in effort no one sees, and then, once a book is published, in the personal connections a writer makes with the reader. Larry McMurtry, author and screenwriter (The Last Picture Show, Hud, Lonesome Dove) once suggested -- facetiously, but what a concept! -- that novels ought to come packaged like DVDs are now, tricked out with extras: drafts of scenes, rejection letters from publishers and wickedly demoralizing letters from lovers and friends, unsolicited advice from well-meaning strangers, editor's disagreements, different endings, false starts. It would mark the total deconstruction of the novel: read the published version of what the author actually succeeded in finishing, and then be amazed that the thing ever got written in the first place.

William Carlos Williams & Ezra Pound, Rutherford, N.J., June, 1959

Disagreements and arguments: A collection of an individual's letters can trace the personal and artistic development of a writer, and his friendships. Here's the first selection from The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, which he wrote to his mother in 1902, when he was 19 at the University of Pennsylvania: "Today, Sunday, it has rained continuously. I went to church today for the first time at the Y.M.C.A. here in the college ..."

Of course the best art of literary letter writing depends on the familiarity between writers, and when two egos clash the results can be a spectacle for the unsuspecting reader fifty or more years on. During World War II, Williams was incensed to hear of Ezra Pound's broadcasts from Rome, during which the Fascist-supporting poet would start a sentence by stating "as my friend Doc Williams of New Jersey would say ..." Florence, Williams's wife, feared for the poet's safety.

In November, 1956, the good doctor's pique at the politics of Ezra Pound led him to lob the following missile at the icon of twentieth century poetry. Pound, who as a supporter of Mussolini during the war was found incompetent to face trial for treason in the U.S., was then incarcerated at Washington's St. Elizabeth's Hospital from 1946 to 1958. Williams wrote:

Dear Assen Poop: Don't speak of apes and Roosevelt to me -- you know as much of the IMPLEMENTATION of what you THINK you are proposing as one of the Wops I used to take care of on Guinea Hill. YOU DON'T EVEN BEGIN TO KNOW what the problem is. Learn to write an understandable letter before you begin to sound off. You don't even know the terms you're using and have never known them. At least you have found a man in ZWECK 2 (ward) who is conscious of the DIFFICULTIES and who, unlike you, has an intelligent understanding of those difficulties and how to present them.
You're too damned thickheaded to know you're asleep -- and have been from the beginning. You are incapable of recognizing what you mean to present and and to hide your stupidity resort to name-calling and general obfuscation. Do you think you will get anywhere that way -- but in jail or the insane asylum where you are now? Mussolini led you there, he was your adolescent hero -- or was it Jefferson? You still don't know the difference.

... But you personally do write poems that are at best supremely beautiful. I'm afraid that for the moment I'll have to let it go at that. I'll go on reading what I can and when a glimmer of brilliant exposition comes through the fog of your verbiage I hope I will still be alive to recognize it.

When Williams died, in 1963, Pound sent a brief note from his home in Italy: "For you he bore with me sixty years. I shall never find another poet-friend like him." I hope my letter-writing friend takes Williams' bracing precedent to heart, and has the fortitude (and good sense) to address me as "Dear Assen Poop," should I ever fall out of his favor. It would be quite an honor.

(Pound and his wife came to Rutherford, N.J. to visit the Williamses fifty-two years ago this June.)

"The Possessed," Elif Batuman: a journey through Russian literature

For readers who have always resolved to read those hefty Russian novels sooner or later, Elif Batuman'sThe Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is a great starting point -- her writing is witty and sharp, and she has a genuine appreciation for authors whose books (let's be politely honest here) require some attention. She falls in love with the books, their characters and stories, and lets us share in the excitement of discovering that great literature is more than "brisk verbs and vivid nouns." Great writing is about a million other things than craft. Batuman's best talent is creating the desire to get the books off the shelf and begin reading, a feat in itself for a literature most Americans consider oblique and daunting.

Her essays, detailing her own reading post-graduate experience, delve into reasons why these books continue to intrigue and thrill readers beyond their labyrinthine plots and tongue-twisting patronyms.Politics, intrigue, adventure, romance, deception, and more politics: the background of Russian literature is a vortex that drew Batuman to read Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky over a seven-year period.

She admits in her introduction that the very "Russian-ness" of the literature was a draw. Apparently, so is her infatuation with the first Russian she met, her violin teacher at the Manhattan School of Music: "Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-colored violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition."

Love: the universal condition that propels Shakespeare plays and the gilt-foil covers of romance novels drives much Russian literature as well. And then, of course, there is the intrigue that swirls around the writers themselves, whether the politically-motivated persecution of Isaac Babel (his words on being arrested in 1939: "they didn't let me finish") or the possibility (for example) that the revered Tolstoy may have been murdered.

Her earnest proposal on that topic got her as far as a symposium in Moscow; after reading a Tolstoy biography she was inspired to write the following theory for a class:

"Arguably Russia's most controversial public figure, Tolstoy was not without powerful enemies. 'More letters threatening my life,' he noted in 1897, when his defense of the Dukhobor sect drew loud protests from the Orthodox Church and Tsar Nikolai, who even had Tolstoy followed by the secret police.

As is often the case, Tolstoy's enemies were no more alarming than his so-called friends, for instance, the pilgrims who swarmed Yasnaya Polyana: a shifting mass of philosophers, drifters, and desperados, collectively referred to by the domestic staff as 'the Dark Ones.' These volatile characters included a morphine addict who had written a mathematical proof of Christianity: a barefoot Swedish septuagenarian who preached sartorial 'simplicity' and who eventually had to be driven away 'because he was beginning to be indecent'; and a blind Old Believer who pursued the sound of Tolstoy's footsteps, shouting 'Liar! Hypocrite!' ...

'You are certainly my most entertaining student,' said my advisor when I told her about my theory. 'Tolstoy -- murdered! Ha! Ha! Ha! The man was eighty-two years old with a history of stroke!'

'That's exactly what would make it the perfect crime,' I explained patiently.

The department was not convinced. They did, however, give me the $1000 grant to present my paper."

The Possessed provides an entertaining first resource for readers, and the book's light-heartedness conceals a hefty amount of research in Russian literature. Batuman's book is a kind of literary autobiography, as her own coming-of-age shaggy-dog stories lead into the twists and turns of the novels she reads. While that approach doesn't always lead to great insights, it certainly makes scaling the heights of Russian masterworks easier to contemplate.

Being Ernest: "a galloping parody of masculinity"

Ernest Hemingway, author and the original, literary self-created image of a macho man, killed himself July 2, 1961. Yet after fifty years it's still unclear why Hemingway -- dressed in a favorite robe for his final exit -- fulfilled a kind of predestined end for himself.

For months his wife, Mary, publicly claimed he accidentally shot himself cleaning guns at six in the morning. Others knew better: He offered a much more likely warning to those who partied with him: "I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish," he told Ava Gardner, "so I won't kill myself."

When the written word finally failed him, he was devastated. He could not compose a single sentence for a presentation volume for Kennedy's inauguration in January, 1961. His fear of failure contributed a creeping sense of illness -- the edges of dementia have been suggested over the years since his death -- but specific causes have been a mystery.

A new, full examination of Hemingway's ultimate decision appears in the weekend edition of the Independent, UK, based on psychological research indicating Hemingway's bipolar mood disorder, depression, chronic alcoholism, repetitive traumatic brain injuries, the onset of psychosis. The twentieth century's most celebrated literary tough guy had a death wish, instilled at an early age from a doting mother and a bullying father.

Here's an excerpt from the lengthy article by correspondent John Walsh, in which he identifies Papa Ernest's restlessness and macho personality as "a galloping parody of masculinity":

... Some answers were offered in 2006 by a long article in the American Psychiatry magazine, called "Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide". It was by Christopher D. Martin, whose official title is Instructor and Staff Psychiatrist at the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas. ...

He had no trouble in diagnosing the author as suffering from "bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probably borderline and narcissistic personality traits". He notes that many in the Hemingway family –- his father and mother, their siblings, his own son and his grand-daughter Margaux -– were prone to manic-depression (Margaux's was the fifth, or possibly sixth, suicide in four generations) and suggests that it was Ernest's manic episodes that drove him to his astonishing feats of creativity. But he locates the writer's trauma in two childhood experiences.

It seems that it was his mother Grace's habit to dress him, as a child, in long white frocks and fashion his hair like a little girl's. It was a 19th-century custom to dress infants alike, but she took it to extremes. She referred to him, in his cute lacy dress, as "Dutch dolly". She said she was his Sweetie, or, as he pronounced it, "Fweetee". Once, when Ernest was two, Grace called him a doll once too often. He replied, "I not a Dutch dolly... Bang, I shoot Fweetee".

But she also praised him for being good at hunting in the woods and fishing in the stream in boys' clothes. It was too confusing for a sensitive kid. He always hated her, and her controlling ways. He always referred to her as "that bitch". He'd spend the rest of his life in a galloping parody of masculinity. Dutch dolly indeed. He'd show the bitch there was no confusion in his head.

"I shoot Fweetee." The trouble was, he also wanted to shoot his father. Clarence Hemingway was a barrel-chested, six-foot bully, a disciplinarian who beat his son with a razor strop. Ernest didn't retaliate directly. He bottled it up and subsumed it into a ritual, in which he'd hide in a shed in the family backyard with a loaded shotgun and take aim at his father's head.

Martin speculates that, when Clarence shot himself, Hemingway, aged 29, felt terrible guilt that he'd fantasised about killing him. Unable to handle this, he took to blaming his mother for his father's death. "I hate her guts and she hates mine," he wrote in 1949. "She forced my father to suicide."

After Clarence's death, Hemingway told a friend, "My life was more or less shot out from under me, and I was drinking much too much entirely through my own fault". ...

(Photo by George Karger, Time Life/Getty)

"The pure products of America go crazy": William Carlos Williams' pronouncement -- though not specifically aimed at Hemingway -- is a good analysis of the psychodrama of Hemingway's life, and the highwire act he performed in the glare of the camera lights. It's a supreme irony that at the end, as the river of creativity dried up, Hemingway couldn't handle the ultimate silence that echoed in his thoughts.

As with some other writers who try to silence that deafening roar with drugs, alcohol, and obsession, the sound Hemingway was trying to erase with the sound of a shotgun blast was the ultimate tolling of a single bell. At the end, it was the only sound Hemingway could really hear.