Category: Fiction

As far as “Great American Novels” go, this one should be considered too, despite its intermittent racism: Plutocracy.

Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’

Continue reading Great American Novels

Cockburn – Adieu to Norman Mailer (scroll down)

St. Clair – Mailer and Us: the Writer as Fighter

Some of those texts don’t stand up all that well: the Picasso biography reads like notations from an art history lecture at the MOMA, Tough Guys Don’t Dance a mediocre Ross McDonald novel, The Deer Park, his novel about Hollywood, should have been better, the Marilyn books are almost as pathetic as his long-running obsession with Jack Kennedy.

Still for fifty years Mailer stood at the top of the pile: The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore (a novel about official paranoia that is perhaps more relevant today than when it was published), An American Dream, Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Harlot’s Ghost. All better books than anything written by that favorite of the book critics Philip Roth. Only Vidal comes close to Mailer’s long-running achievement.

It’s hard to name a better novel written in the 1970s than The Executioner’s Song. Even Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow seems dwarfed by that sprawling portrait of Gary and Nicole Gilmore and the inexorable descent toward the firing squad in that spooky prison outside Provo. It’s a big book with an immediate voice: clear and chilling. Among other virtues, Mailer captures the strangeness and beauty of life in Utah better than any book since Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country.

…

So some say. Against all evidence – evidence of the reactionary, in this case:

Since it’s publication in 1957, Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand’s novels, has never been out of print. It continues to receive critical attention and is considered one of the most influential books ever published, impacting a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business and political science. Continue reading Novels Make Nothing Happen?

As I note in The Reactionary Ayn Rand, she favored a dictatorship of wealth in her life and work, not least in her two main novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (originally, ironically, titled The Strike):

Rand’s [ostensibly] irreproachable characters take their principled stands against adult corruptions of various sorts…but also ultimately on behalf of the anti-democratic rule of wealth – entirely reminiscent of the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay: “Those who own the country, ought to govern it.”

So Rand’s false either-or choice is this: choose life or death; righteousness or immorality: an ideal benevolent dictatorship of wealth or an inevitably fatally corrupt democracy. She attacks an indefensibly corrupt elite on behalf of a nonexistent elite whose closest manifestation in reality is another version of an indefensibly corrupt elite. Totalitarian ostensibly benevolent corporate elite rule versus totalitarian malign governmental elite rule. The choice is as false as could be, of course, but Rand presents the former as freedom and goodness, and the latter as slavery and rot by way of psychological comparisons that often resonate strongly with youth sick of being governed by often highly imperfect, and in fact highly unprincipled, school and family and religious structures, and who also may see big corporate money as a key to freedom.

Rand is symptomatic and emblematic of the current diseased socio-political structure – an understanding that totally eludes everyone involved with the article below.

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

By Harriet Rubin

New York Times

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

One of Rand’s most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Rand’s free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, “King of Kings.”

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of “The Fountainhead” began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.” Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”

Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of “Atlas.” He created an “open book” company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

 Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in “Atlas”: people guided by reason and self-interest.

“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

“We were reading the book,” she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. “For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ” 

Reprinted for the first time after 117 years, a couple years after this review drafted.

The Fate of Plutocracy
And the Future of Epic Imaginative Writing

I. An American Epic Disappeared

Over a century before former U.S. president Jimmy Carter tried his hand at a (historical) novel, another national political figure from Georgia, Thomas Manson Norwood wrote a “politico-social” novel titled Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery, a lost work of literature, which, despite egregious flaws, should be considered an important epic of American imaginative writing.[1] Part classic Victorian novel, part satiric epic, this literary hybrid has long since been forgotten1 even though both the literary reach and cultural relevance of Plutocracy is comparable to other major American (U.S.) imaginative works of any era, including major works of its own time, such as Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scarlet Letter.

It seems likely that Plutocracy has disappeared from history largely due to cultural and political factors that are neither necessarily surprising nor difficult to understand, which may in part be indicated by the novel’s full title: Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery. The complete disappearance of a major American work of the imagination by a U.S. statesman from not only literature and literary history but also from nearly all historical record likely indicates that there are considerably deeper social and cultural forces and prejudices than, for example, the entrenched racism and sexism operating in the United States. Though racism and sexism are of course powerful forms of chauvinism, institutionalized and otherwise, that have contributed to the burial of highly accomplished African-American literary works – such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God – and works by women generally – including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening – it seems that even more fundamental forces such as economic chauvinism, or some combination of economic and class prejudice, along with American (U.S.) nationalism have acted to essentially blank Plutocracy from history.[2]

Continue reading Plutocracy

Book reviewer John Freeman writes in “Our Work, In Perspective“:

“…disappeared [are] the names of so many of the critics who described and depicted Kerouac’s literary journey into the world (and into bookstores). It’s a sobering lesson for a book critic. In the end, no matter how much we write about a book today, it — and usually it alone — will be creating the imaginary landscape we live in tomorrow.” 

On the contrary, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of literary criticism and reviews. The reactionary and status quo forces in the US and elsewhere surely don’t think that way. And for good reason. Criticism and reviews can make and break imaginative writing. Look at the history of the critical reception and its importance to the fate of the writing of, say, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston, and even William Faulkner, and many others. 

 

Both fiction and criticism can seriously affect culture and society. Pakistan has banned all fiction from India, apparently because it fears its private and public transformative power. Pakistan allows some forms of nonfiction but literary criticism and reviews are not among those. 

 

As Michael Hanne notes in his careful study, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change: 

 

“Storytelling, it must be recognized from the start, is always associated with the exercise, in one sense or another, of power, of control. This is true of even the commonest and apparently most innocent form of storytelling in which we engage: that almost continuous internal narrative monologue which everyone maintains, sliding from memory, to imaginative reworking of past events, to fantasizing about the future, to daydreaming…. It is a curious thing that, in the liberal democracies, the word ‘power’ is used more frequently than any other by publishers and reviewers to indicate, and invite, approval of a work of narrative fiction…. This flooding of popular critical discourse with the term ‘power’ does not, of course, indicate a widespread belief in the capacity of narrative fiction to ‘change the world.’ The use of ‘power’…indicates little more than approval of the novel’s capacity to involve and move the individual reader emotionally. Indeed the term is so devalued as to imply a denial that narrative fiction can exercise power in a wider social and political sense…. Power, as is usual in a liberal democracy, is treated as individual and unproblematic, rather than collective, structural, and problematic. 

 

“Two important corollaries follow from this: a) there is no public acknowledgement that literature plays a role in the maintenance of existing power structures and b) literature is seen as incapable of playing a seriously disruptive role within such a society…. If, in a liberal democracy, a piece of imaginative writing seeks or achieves social or political influence that goes beyond such a limited conception of its proper power, it must either be nonliterature masquerading as literature or a literary work being manipulated and misused for nonliterary, propagandistic purposes…. In overtly authoritarian states whose form of government does not rely on liberal bourgeois conceptions of constitutionality, such as Russia under the Tsars or the Soviet Union under Stalin, these assumptions are entirely reversed. Literature is required, by a combination of censorship and patronage, to contribute to the maintenance of power as constituted at the time. The government’s insistence on retaining tight control over what is written and published reflects the belief, which is most often shared by the regime’s opponents, that fictional writing possesses an extreme potential for disruption.” 

 

“…narrative fiction, in certain circumstances, plays a central role in the lives and political thinking of ordinary people…”

 

The same surely holds both directly and indirectly for criticism and reviews. 

 

It’s also evident that to great though varying degrees in both types of society, “Literature is required, by a combination of censorship and patronage, to contribute to the maintenance of power as constituted at the time.” 

It’s often done unconsciously in the more democratic societies, though far from always, as a number of progressive-minded literary critics and imaginative writers – and reviewers, no doubt – over these many years can attest.

By Seth Sandronsky 

[Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes By Jonathan Scott ( Columbia , University of Missouri Press, 2006), 272 pp. Hardcover, $39.95.]

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a great American poet. But he did not stop there. Jonathan Scott’s new Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes helps us to take pleasure in his originality and productivity.

“I’ve been obsessed by the relation between the individual and the collective,” writes Scott, a Detroit native who teaches English in Jerusalem. To this end, he illuminates Hughes’ patterns of poetry and prose as organic ingredients of social actions in the United States and abroad at that time in history. Our repressive era lacks a similar writer or politics.

Scott’s book has four parts. Part one looks at Hughes and his work on African-American culture that sees society from a unique point of view informed by a daily struggle for justice. This vision, Scott writes, also is open to unity with others who labor for a living.

For instance, in the body of literature that Hughes produced, the blues constituted a culture that was more than art by, of and for blacks. Rather, the blues were a canvas for the lives of oppressed working people of all hues, voicing a socialist joy of potential human liberation.

“I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you,” wrote Hughes as a 20-something, “for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two and see what worms are eating at the rind.”

Hughes’ essays and poems placed daughters and sons of former slaves within a mass of wage earners bridled by the time clock and the workplace. Both restricted their full abilities. Readers here and abroad responded to Hughes’ emancipatory writing, but mainstream critics were cold to his literary flair. In part two, Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban national poet, had a different reaction. He and Hughes met in 1930. Their union helped Guillén create new forms of popular poetry for Cubans who were struggling to free themselves from Western colonialism.

In part three, Scott turns to Hughes’ journalism from the 1940s to the 1960s, “his most popular literary innovation since his blues poems of the 1920s and 1930s.” In the Chicago Defender, a black-owned paper, Hughes penned “Here to Yonder,” a column with a main character named Jesse B. Simple. He spoke with Hughes and other blacks about current events, including class conflict among and between them, while rejecting their shared second-rate citizenship. Readers loved this column, a community talking book. In it, Hughes seeded a transformative dialogue about the living and working conditions of regular women and men. As a columnist, Hughes urged social equality “through the popular language of the African-American laborer,” Scott notes. This message was loud and clear in the Civil Rights movement.

In part four, we read about Hughes, a pioneering author of children’s literature. This, like his journalistic efforts, attracted new readers. The First Book of Rhythms flowed from his time as a writing teacher for Chicago students in the eighth grade. Hughes emphasized their use of drawing to describe movement, a process which has animated the natural world from the days of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

“Hughes’ method is an ingenious way of getting students to think in terms of the rhythms of prose writing; of lyrical flow; of word sequences, transitions, cadences and caesuras,” Scott writes.

“Already there is the room to start and stop as suits the writer, but in a disciplined, rhythmized way.” The connections between listening, seeing and writing blossomed in Hughes’s able hands. Parents and classroom teachers of middle and high-school students, take note!

Currently, Hughes has a larger stature outside the United States than inside of it. Here, he is largely a writer studied during Black History Month and otherwise ignored. That is a shame and a trend to end. Scott’s book may be a move in that direction.

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