Changing My Mind (45 page)

But I still resist “limp and languid.”

Again,
Middlemarch
is an interesting comparison. Readers often prefer Lydgate and are disappointed at Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw.

The (very good) biography is
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neal
e
Hurston
by Valerie Boyd. Also very good is
Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
, collected and edited by Carla Kaplan.

Dust Tracks on a Road
is Hurston’s autobiography.

All the critical voices quoted above can be found in
Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God:
Modern Critical Interpretations
, edited by Harold Bloom.

Hurston, by contrast, wanted her writing to demonstrate the fact that “Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times as boring as everybody else.”

Not least of which is Alice Walker’s original introduction to
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. By championing the book, she rescued Hurston from forty years of obscurity.

A footnote for the writers in the audience:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
was written in seven weeks.

See chapter 16 for a sad portrayal of a truly color-struck lady, Mrs. Turner.

I think this was the point my mother was trying to make.

As Kafka’s
The Trial
plumbs that ancient buildup of cultural residue that is called “Jewishness.”

Down on the muck, Janie and Tea Cake befriend the “Saws,” workers from the Caribbean.

Until they read books featuring nonwhite characters. I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.”

At its most common and banal: catching a beat, following a rhythm.

In the
Oxford English Dictionary:
“
Schmaltz n
. informal. excessive sentimentality, esp. in music or movies. ORIGIN 1930s: from Yiddish
schmaltz
, from German
Schmalz
‘dripping, lard.’ ”

Is there anything less soulful than attempting to define soulfulness?

In literary terms, we know that there is a tipping point at which the cultural particular—while becoming no less culturally particular—is accepted by readers as the neutral universal. The previously “Jewish fiction” of Philip Roth is now “fiction.” We have moved from the particular complaints of Portnoy to the universal claims of Everyman.

The book in question is
The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960
, University of Missouri Press.

He refers to the narrative version by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

The book recommended is
The Social Substance of Religion
by Gerald Heard.

Next to the phrase “into her dream he melted” was written “You mean he fucked her, do you?”

The other panelists: Desmond MacCarthy, Rose Macaulay, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Philip Toynbee.

“I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.”

His translated poetry reader of 1944,
Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev
, takes care to include three sparklingly written mini-biographies of the poets.

Another way of thinking about the distinction might be: there is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease, and the fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is
way out
on the second. Joyce is even further.