THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Ticknor Revisited

Anne, the blogger behind Fernham, is the kind of woman who likes to be prepared. Knowing her baby was on the way, she graded student papers early, copyedited her work in advance, and even blogged through the early pangs of labor. Her organization and presence of mind inspires awe.

Instead of What to Expect When You're Expecting, Anne dug into the LBC titles and sent us her insightful take on Ticknor. She references both Ticknor and Television in her notes — you will be hearing more on the comparison between these two titles when we discuss Television during the week of May 29th.

For now we hope Anne is resting and recovering and spending plenty of time with her newborn. We send her all our good thoughts and wishes and we look forward to her return to the blogging bureau.  Below are her reading notes on Ticknor:

Reading about writer's block

By chance, I read these two books one after the other and, both times, I got stuck—I almost couldn't go on because the sense of identification with the unhappy, blocked narrator was too intense. This is my character—when I'm reading contemporary fiction, I tend to plunge in with too great a suspension of disbelief and much too great a willingness to identify with the narrator. It's partly circumstantial, too: I was embroiled in a bit of a copyediting nightmare of my own as I read about these unhappy writers. But to call the narrator of Television unhappy may be to project my all-to-American work ethic onto him. Think about when he goes to the park and strips down to the nude, in the German way, thinking about how to begin his manuscript: "But wasn't this working, I asked myself, this gradual, progressive opening of the mind, this steady sharpening of the senses?" (51)

What you're missing

Ticknor obsesses about what he might be missing at the party—torn between knowing reminders that all large dinner parties are ultimately dull, that he is not the most glittering or beloved of the guests, and hoping or fearing that this night will be different. In Television,  the narrator seesaws between the knowledge of how dumb television is and the sense, when you're not watching, that "something might happen if you turned it on" (66). This is a writer's dilemma, it seems to me: that sense of trying to strike the balance between the living necessary to sustain a mind and imagination and the retreat necessary to get the actual writing done. The comedy in both novels comes from the way in which these writers screw up the balance completely—neither living fully nor writing.

Coming Attraction

Since the Heti podcast is experiencing technical difficulties, I thought I'd jump in with a quick reminder that next week we'll turn our attention to Jeff Ford's The Girl in the Glass. A timely book to discuss, what with it just having won an Edgar in the Best Paperback Original category.

The week will start off with some discussion among members (join in!), feature some commentary about Ford by writers and bloggers outside the LBC midweek, host Ford as guest blogger on Thursday and wrap up with a fantastic podcast by Bat Segundo himself. Please do come by, y'all.

Heti Podcast Delayed

Much to my regret and annoyance, I have lost a good deal of work with which I lost sleep and spent many hours on.  Thankfully, the audio files are still here.  They simply need to be re-engineered from scratch again.  But the final product, alas, will have to be postponed until next week.  Apologies for any inconvenience. 

Interview with Sheila Heti

The following is an interview with Sheila Heti, author of the short story collection, The Middle Stories, and the recently published novel, Ticknor.  More can be learned about Sheila at http://www.sheilaheti.net/.

Dan:

Hello Sheila, thank you for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Sheila:

You're welcome. What schedule?

Dan:

You were born in Toronto.  Might as well open with a huge stereotype – how big a Leafs fan are you?

Sheila:

I actually don't follow hockey. I like other clichés about Toronto, though, like the CN Tower.

Dan:

You studied both Art History and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  How do you think those studies have wandered into your writing?

Sheila:

In every way. They are the basis of what I find interesting about writing, the way that it's part of a continuum of art-making, that it asks questions about what is the world, where one can find value in life, what are the materials that make up existence. I am less interested in story than other people seem to be; stories make me impatient on principle. What I like about writing is that it is reveals a system of thought; this is true of philosophy, obviously, but paintings also reveal their systems in a terrifically immediate
way.

Dan:

Is an MFA not something available at the University of Toronto?  Or were you not interested in being taught writing?

Sheila:

It's probably offered, but it just never appealed to me, going to school to write; it always seemed like something you had to learn on your own – like having sex, I wouldn't go to school for that either. You do it until you figure it out, and the figuring it out is part of the fun. It should be natural, not institutional. Besides, for me, the essential joy of making art is that it has nothing to do with anyone else.

Dan:

You then studied playwriting at the National Theatre School. Were you already writing fiction at that time?

Ticknor: A Q&A with FSG Editor Lorin Stein

Lorin Stein is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Salon Guide to Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere.  He's also the American editor of Ticknor and I recently conducted this email interview with him.

TEV: Ticknor was published in Canada last year by House of Anansi. In a case like this one, is the role of the editor strictly one of acquisition? How much work, if any, was done on Ticknor between its Canadian and American iterations?

LS:  Actually, FSG acquired US rights in the book before the Canadian edition appeared. So what little editing I did (and it was little) is reflected in both editions.

TEV: How did you become aware of the book?

LS: Sheila's agent, Anne McDermid, sent it to me.

TEV:  In our correspondence, we talked about the miracle of "ventriloquism" that Sheila pulls off and we acknowledged that it drew both of us to the work. What other factors drew you to Ticknor?

It's tricky to talk about factors besides ventriloquism, or voice, don't you think? Voice is character, but it's also humor and worldview and sense of the language. In a book like Ticknor it's also what the character *does,* and why he does it, so in a funny way voice is plot. Or the DNA of plot. Take those first few sentences:

There were no books when I was a boy. Books were hardly accessible, yet there were some books. That is why I did not develop literary taste. I read what I found and it was for fun. You read mostly for idle pleasure. I did not read for fun, nore was I cultivating my mind. I cannot imagine cultivating anything as a young boy. It is not my fault if I was not an erudite boy. Other boys had books and other boys had libraries. No, the whole country lacked books then. Comparatively few were published here, and they were borrowed with difficulty. There is no possible way I could have read good books.

Each sentence takes us closer and closer to nonsense--and yet each seems to follow organically, necessarily, from the one before. That's voice. It's also the story. And you can't fake it for a dozen sentences. The guy's alive--he's as alive and unpredictable as an auditory hallucination. When I finished the first page of the MS. I remember passing it to a friend and saying, Read this. I was pretty sure this was something we'd want to publish.

TEV: I can see the meetings now ... "It's a short novel in the first person, told in the voice of a 19ht century Boston historian. He's late for dinner, carrying a pie, and it's about thwarted expectations." How did that go over, and how much of a struggle (if at all) was it to bring Ticknor to the US?

LS: No struggle at all! My colleagues felt the way I did. Of course the book is peculiar, even a tiny bit insane. It's not Oprah material, but its quality and originality spoke for themselves. Besides, some books are hard to publish in a fun way. I think this is one of them--it wins people over one at a time, the way it won you over, and that's great to watch. In some ways it's the most fun part of the job.

TEV: I was struck not just by the beauty of the language and the vivid rendering of Ticknor's interior life but also by some of the deeper, mischievous questions the books poses. It assumes a bitter rivalry where, in fact, there was a warm friendship. One of Ticknor's best known titles was his glowing biography of Prescott but Sheila turns this all on its head, and we're asked to reassess that biography in light of all this hidden bile. What did you make of this provocative little detour?

LS: I didn't make anything of it, really. Ticknor was just a name to me. It's true that Sheila's Ticknor turns out to have very little to do with the real biographer--or with early nineteenth-century Boston, for that matter. It's full of anachronisms. But how much do Shakespeare's Henry V or Marlowe's Tamburlaine have to do with their historical antecedents or their periods? This kind of fooling around is a very traditional way of making up characters--much older than what we usually mean when we talk about "historical fiction."

But tell me, doesn't Sheila's Ticknor love Prescott? Isn't all love a little bit love-hate? (Maybe these are the kinds of mischievous questions you mean ... )

TEV:  When you sent me the book, your letter included an acknowledgement of the general superiority of Hungarians (beyond chess and physics). Tell us a bit more about your affection for my people.

LS:  The Hungarians rock! Here's a country slightly larger than the state of New Jersey, one fourth the size of Poland, whose people speak a basically unlearnable language and yet (when they're not checkmating the pants off other rocket scientists) churn out one major piece of world literature after another. Sure, New Jersey has Philip Roth and Sam Lipsyte--but you guys have Arthur Koestler, Sandor Marai, Imre Kertesz, Peter Esterhazy, Ismail Kadare, Peter Nadas. These are the ones even *I*'ve heard of! There's even another Canado-Hungarian, Stephen Vizinczey, who managed to make Communist Hungary sound almost as swinging as Kundera's Czechoslovakia. Coincidence? Or yet more evidence that Hungarians are extra-terrestrials whose giant brains tremble on their stalklike necks?

TEV:  In addition to your editing duties, you're also a translator. You've got a forthcoming translation of Gregoire Bouillier's memoir The Mystery Guest, which you've translated from the French, even as you've conceded that your French is lousy. So how does that work, exactly?

LS: My French was *just* good enough for me to fall in love with the book--it kept making me laugh out loud. So either I was making up funny jokes, which seemed unlikely, or else I was hearing something there in the original. That's what made me sit down and translate the first few pages.

Also, I had a brilliant and sensitive first reader and editor in Bouillier's US agent, Violaine Huisman. She caught actual errors, but any French person with good English could do that. What was really useful was her ear for tone and nuance in both languages. She could tell me when she thought I was missing the feel, the sparkiness of the original. She turned me on to the book in the first place--without the nod from her I'd never have dared to do it myself.

I had other readers too: a couple of Bouillier's friends in Paris, plus my colleagues Annie Wedekind and Jonathan Galassi and my friend John Jeremiah Sullivan, all wonderful writers and editors who've thought a lot about problems of translation. Jonathan, who's my boss, is well known as a translator of Italian poetry. He was by far the toughest critic of my prose. He caught a bunch of rookie mistakes in the first chapter. They were enough to make me revise the whole thing.

Lorin will be reading a story by Veronique Ovalde which he translated from the French, this evening at KGB Bar.  Details here.

Ticknor: Spoilers Ahead!

I've mentioned that Ticknor is a character study, but I don't mean to suggest that there is no progression or plot in the novel. In fact, there's a mystery at the heart of the book: what is the source of the alienation between Ticknor and Prescott? Is it simply, as Ticknor suggests, that Prescott's success has carried him out of Ticknor's orbit? Or that is it that Ticknor's departure to Europe as his friend's eye injury worsened, and Ticknor's failure to write during that period, offended Prescott and his family?

I think the answer lies in three pages towards the end of the book. I'll put it in the comments thread, so I don't spoil the surprise for those who haven't read the book.

If you've read the book, tell me if you think I'm right.

Ticknor: Apologies and Platitudes

With a public apology to Ed, I have removed my prior post.  What I'd thought was humorous was clearly not taken that way, and so we add another mark to the column of misfired attempts at humor and solider on. 

I can say that I found myself wondering not only what book Ed read but what post he read.  He quotes me as saying that "the book's tone doesn't 'rely on tired platitudes' " but I said no such thing.  Here's the tired platitudes section from my original post:

I remember some time ago, Steve Mitchelmore posted something (wish I could find the link) about challenging us to really be able to explain why we enjoyed a book so much, not to simply rely on tired platitudes.

Nothing to do with the book or its style, but how we think about books.  And it's clear from Ed's post that we do think about books very differently.  I find the overload of detail Ed prefers stultifying.  I get insulted as a reader when every single gesture and emotion is spelled out and writ large.  I prefer the subtle brush stroke over the kitchen sink, and so perhaps it was foreordained that we would not see eye to eye on the book.   At any rate, I reiterate a public apology for any offense given.

Sam's more interesting point about Ticknor's literary forebears bears closer examination.  Whatever use Heti might have made of original source material, it's clear enough to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Ticknor's life that she's wrested it free and infused it with something considerably more than transcription. 

By the way, you can read an original 1864 review of Ticknor's Life here at the Cornell website.

(Oh and for the record, I don't think there is a real long-short debate.  There are good long books and bad long books, and there are good short books and bad short books.  I don't think anyone would disagree that long for long's sake isn't necessarily better - that's all I've ever said.)

Ticknor: Facts and Fiction

This morning I realized that the long-book/short-book debate parallels the relationship between Ticknor, laboring for ten years on his article about canals, and his friend Prescott, writing his three-volume histories by dictation, "never trifling with style, but with style flowing from his lips." Poor Ticknor - never on the popular side of any argument!

As you've probably deduced from our discussion, Ticknor is primarily a character study, painted in the hero's own words. Not incidentally, it is also, in part, a biography of Prescott, told by our hero.

Ed's comment on the novel's sources reminds me of the unusual note that occurs at the end of the novel:

Ticknor was inspired by the Life of William Hickling Prescott, by George Ticknor (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott Company, 1863). Sentences and scenes have been borrowed from that book, and from the work of Florence Nightengale, Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis, Sofia Tolstoy, among other writers.

I haven't looked at the sources, but I'd expect we're not exactly talking here about the literary equivalent of the "mash-up." Although I admit, I've had some fun trying to guess where those sentences and scenes are. The platitudinous tributes to Prescott that are sprinkled throughout the book ring so true to the period that I'd be shocked to see that some of them aren't from The Life. Part II of the book, excepting the first paragraph, begins with a straightforward biographical essay on Prescott in which our hero Ticknor moves entirely into the background. If this isn't verbatim, I'd love to see what changes Heti introduces. I don't know anything about the life of Marie Stopes, but Florence Nightingale is clearly the troublesome nurse who should be sent back to Europe.

One of the fascinating things about this book, of course, is that fact that the characters are based on real people. What Heti has supplied is a fictional emotional life behind the factual events.

Ticknor: Generalizations Don't Count

My colleague Mark Sarvas has attracted my attention (and inspired this post) by pointing to William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace as examples of bloat, or, as he styles, “heft equals significance.”  Now ordinarily I could let such sullies slide.  And I should preface my statement by noting that Mr. Sarvas is a good man, mischievous and delightfully jocular. But when the comparative indicator is Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, a novel that is, in this reader’s estimation, quite problematic and a tome that is without that ambition which crackles on every page and delights in every paragraph, certain allegations must be responded to.

Mark writes of “the miracle of voice that Heti pulls off,” that the book’s tone doesn’t “rely on tired platitudes.”  There are further suggestions by both Sam and Mark that the book is “darkly funny.”

As will soon be reported in various interviews, the “voice” that Heti is striving for was culled from the most lackluster of sources: namely, the dull and humorless papers of historian George Ticknor, which were reportedly copied, in some cases, almost word-for-word by Heti into this novel.  On a rudimentary level, this might be an achievement in mimesis.  If this is the case, we might very well send in a legion of cheerleaders to celebrate the work of a copyist working sixteen hour days.

But when the results are banal passages such as the below, one must call into question the labors of the endeavor:

The bathwater was cold when I pulled myself from the tub, dripping down.  I looked about me for a towel, but all of the towels were gone.  They were not hanging in the bathroom or lying on the floor.  They were in the outer room, which was filled up with smoke.  I would have to go and dry myself in there, and the bath -- a waste; the smoke sticking to my skin, stinking me up again.  (60)

This represents Ticknor’s dilemma in a nutshell.  Here is a protagonist wholly incapable of active behavior throughout Ticknor’s interminable 118 pages.  Even something as inconsequential as a towel proves to be comparable to climbing Everest.  One might have found a certain amount of pleasure in prodigious kvetching, comparable to Nicholson Baker’s quotidian obsessions in The Mezzanine or the atmosphere that reflects Leo Feldman’s incarceration in Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man, had Heti actually bothered to provide us with Ticknor’s feelings rather than the incongruous geography of inconsequential objects. But there is no underlying point to Ticknor’s negativity – nothing along the lines of the telltale cat juxtaposing Sophie Bentwood’s inner turmoil in Paula Fox’s excellent novel Desperate Characters.  Nothing that offers us a point of ambiguity, a conduit of some sort, which might connect the towels with Ticknor’s fears. 

One is more puzzled than enchanted by these details.  There is the awkward “dripping down,” appended to the opening sentence, but more of a generalized feeling of despair rather than an explicit emotion.  There is the outright wrong “I looked about me” when Ticknor knows very well where the towels are.  Heti’s mistake is to fixate on inconsequential details rather than dramatizing consequential emotions such as pain or jealousy or telling us why the towels might mean something.  Okay, so they’re laden with smoke.  We get this.  But we have no clue as to why Ticknor would place them in a room where the smoke will seep into their fiber. There is perhaps the unvoiced possibility that he expects some anonymous servant to take care of him and to give him his precious towels.  But if this were the case, why not simply say this?  If the intention here is to impute that Ticknor wants someone to pamper him, why not offer an imaginary servant?  A missing link much like Fox’s cat?

In concentrating exhaustively on the towels, Heti misses out on a “darkly funny” possibility which might have allowed a conduit between Ticknor and his towels.  The reader, as a result, fails to get inside Ticknor’s head. Catastrophically, Heti offers us not one, but two sentences describing their location.  And the result is a passage that is dull and without payoff.  We’ve all experienced moments where a crisp towel is beyond one’s reach.  But there is generally a very human reason for this: it might be indolence at failing to do the laundry or an overall sense of planning towels with one’s personal hygiene. 

How is such deliberate obfuscation in any sense “a miracle of voice?”  How are these very generalities anything less than “tired platitudes?”  It is utterly trite to mention soiled towels without so much as an indication as to the existential factors explicating why they were despoiled.  Would it not be more interesting or “darkly funny” to know why Ticknor has sabotaged his own post-bath experience?  Sadly, as is all too common throughout the novel, we are given nothing but these generalizations.  And one might argue the obverse: that skimping out on these telling details provides us with insignificance. Personally, I’ll take Vollmann charting as many details (perhaps too enthusiastically at times) of a den of whores over Heti’s inability to get to the heart of the matter.

Ticknor: Size Doesn't Count

Thanks for starting the ball rolling in your usual classy fashion, Sam.  Not sure I can offer the same level of thoughtfulness (it's a gorgeous sunny morning and I'm still waking up) but I'll do my best to hang with the big dogs.

There's so much you've raised that I'd like to touch on but before I do, let me also add that FSG editor Lorin Stein will be appearing in these parts on Wednesday via a Q&A I'm conducting with him, so don't miss that either.

First, on the subject of re-reading books, an anecdote.  Many, many years ago, when I was toiling in one of those endless succession of office jobs we all know so well, I worked with a nice old Southern gent named Bill. He was fast approaching retirement, kind of coasting a bit.  He and I could not have been more different - a liberal and a conservative; a city boy and a shitkicker; opera and country music.  Your basic red and blue scenario.  And yet we became good pals and were quite fond of each other.

One day I mentioned to him that I began each year re-reading The Great Gatsby.  Every January I would sit down with that 50,000-word marvel and read it in a single Sunday.  And every single time, without fail, something new leapt to my atttention.  Now, Bill could not for his life understand why anyone would waste time - those were his words, "waste time" - reading something he'd already read.  I countered with the old standby "If it's not worth reading twice, it's not worth reading once."  I urged him to try it, to humor me, which he did.  (The book he chose is lost to my advanced case of CRS.)

I can say with all modesty that I changed Bill's life that day.

He came back the following week full of excitement - he'd done exactly what I suggested and had experienced a beloved book of his youth through entirely new eyes.  And he was off and running now with a long list of books he wanted to read again.  For all I know, he's busy filling his retirement with re-reading.

I'm now reading Ticknor for the fifth time and I'm struck anew by the miracle of voice that Heti pulls off.  I remember some time ago, Steve Mitchelmore posted something (wish I could find the link) about challenging us to really be able to explain why we enjoyed a book so much, not to simply rely on tired platitudes.  And as an NYU-reject and auto-didact, I've always worried that the reasons I embrace certain books won't stand up to scrutiny.  But I know that voice comes first for me - hence my love of Banville.  (I actually think he would enjoy Ticknor.)

I'm glad you see the humor in the book, Sam.  I worried about that, wondering if folks would get just how blackly funny it is.  And, like you ("I am friends like that"), I was perhaps slightly troubled by just how many Ticknor-ian tendencies I seem to embody.  Which I also suspect is part of Heti's sly joke - what writer hasn't known envy and bitterness?  Seems to go with the territory.

You also talk about length.  I'm on record lamenting the modern, youthful tendency toward bloat, as though heft equals significance.  (See Vollmann, William T or Wallace, David F.  Sorry, Ed!)  There's also, frankly, a presumption on behalf of the author in dropping 1400 pages into my lap.  You'd damn well better be sure you're going to deliver something extraordinary and not merely prolix, given the claim on my time you're making.  (Now, it's true I' m a slow-ish reader so this might feed my own bitterness.)

But Ticknor - like Gatsby - proves you needn't be long to be deep.  You know I'm a screenwriter and one of the tricks of economy we employ is that it's enough to write INT. MANSION - DAY because people will bring their own ideas of the scene to that description.  We use our own experiences to fill in the blanks.  I know plenty of minimalist novels rely on similar tropes.  But how many of us have experiences of 19th century Boston?  And still, in her short novel, Heti has given us a rich and fully realized portrait of that world.  Do you remember the scene in which Ticknor waits in the kitchen while Prescott's wife Claire fixes him a meal?  That kitchen is as vivid to me as my own. 

Interestingly, on the question of long v. short, I've also had an interesting email exchange regarding Etgar Keret's new collection The Nimrod Flip-out, which is outperforming expectations despite very little review coverage thus far.  I suggested that it's because (a) the trade paper edition is considerably cheaper than a new hardcover and (b) the stories are very short - 1-2 pages each.  Couple that with an interesting title and an eye-catching cover and it seems that perhaps it's bringing in younger readers - folks who don't have 30 bucks to spend on a hardcover, and whose attention spans click with the short short stories.  So perhaps even the notion of fiction readers liking long works is on its way out.

All yours, Sam.