Dinaw Mengestu on American writers who have astounded, moved, haunted, and influenced him

How to Read the Air
by Dinaw Mengestu
(Riverhead, 2010)

In our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry, Dinaw Mengestu, whose second novel, How to Read the Air, was published last October, describes the impact several American writers have had on his work.

Like many writers, I can’t help but wear my influences on my sleeve, and while those influences are many, and grow each year, I always think first and foremost of Saul Bellow. I read Bellow for the first time in high school, while living in Chicago. An old friend gave me his tattered paperback copy of The Adventures of Augie March and told me this is where I should begin if I wanted to be a writer. He was right in telling me that Augie March was the proper starting point, but he failed to mention how remarkable Bellow’s later novels were.

From Augie March I found my way to Herzog, a novel which even after multiple readings still astounds me with its density, humor, passion and love, and then later to Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, Henderson the Rain King, and finally to Bellow’s collected short stories. Of all the novels and characters though, it’s the mad, letter-writing Herzog who somehow manages to find his way into all my work, and to whom I return faithfully at least once a year.

Bellow was the first great writer to cement my conviction that there was nothing I wanted to do more in my life than write novels. Since then that conviction has been continually reinforced by other writers who may not share Bellow’s unique style, but in my opinion are equally great. Out of the many writers I would include in that list, the American novelists who come to mind first are:

The “death of the book” is greatly exaggerated

In spite of the barrage of reports proclaiming the imminent death of the book (not to mention the recent troubles at Borders), sales of The Library of America’s backlist catalog are booming. For the last six months, backlist sales are up 18% over the same period last year. In fact the holiday season was so robust (and the trend seems to be continuing) that we unexpectedly ran out of a couple of dozen titles and have been scrambling to keep the reprints coming fast enough.

Here’s a list of the titles with the most impressive increases in sales compared to last year:

1. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings
2. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
3. William James: Writings 1878–1899
4. Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
5. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
6. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations
7. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose
8. Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964
9. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
10. Willa Cather: Later Novels
    (tie) James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume One

A few of these are easily explained. Beginning last April, Keith Olbermann ended his Friday night broadcasts reading selections from Thurber, and the publication of Bellow’s letters almost certainly spurred renewed interest in his novels. Similarly, we’ve always seen an increase in sales of Grant’s memoirs whenever a new presidential memoir is published. But others on the list are, we confess, gratifyingly perplexing.

Related post: The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

John Berryman and Saul Bellow: “joined forces” for twenty years

Most readers believe that Saul Bellow based the character Humboldt in his novel Humboldt’s Gift on the poet Delmore Schwartz. Bellow’s biographer Ruth Miller finds the origin more complex: “Humboldt is a composite person; the failed poet is Delmore Schwartz but only in part. Part is also Isaac Rosenfeld and John Berryman.”

In the memoir Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson (Berryman's wife at the time) recalls witnessing the developing friendship between Bellow and Berryman (whose birthday is today, October 25) when the two men were teaching at Princeton in 1951:

Returning from a Sunday walk down by Lake Carnegie with Monroe Engel and Saul, John said to me, “I like Bellow more each time I see him. A lovely man. And a comedian. He threw a log he found at the edge of the lake into the water and, with a gesture of command, said “Go. Go be a hazard.”

A few days later John came home with a typescript of Saul’s new novel and said “I’m going to take the weekend off to read this.” Seated in his red leather chair, immobile for hours except to light a cigarette, make a note on a small white pad, run the corkscrew he liked to toy with through his fingers, or let out a high-pitched “eeeeeeeeeeeee,” which meant he was laughing so hard he couldn't get his breath, he trained his intelligence on The Adventures of Augie March, giving it the kind of reading every writer dreams of having. After the first chapter, he said, “It's damn good.” When he finished, “Bellow is it. I'm going to have lunch with him and tell him he's a bloody genius and so on.”

Published in 1953, The Adventures of Augie March was a critical and financial triumph that catapulted Bellow to fame and won for him the National Book Award. In the same year Partisan Review published Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; its publication in book form three years later established Berryman as a new and distinctive voice. Berryman would later dedicate to Bellow “Dream Song 75” in his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection 77 Dream Songs (1964).

In 1971, in his last letter to Bellow, Berryman exulted about the birth of his daughter, his high expectations for his own first novel, and Bellow’s news of starting Humboldt’s Gift.

Let’s join forces, large and small, as in the winter beginning of 1953 in Princeton, with the Bradstreet blazing and Augie fleecing away. We’re promising.

Berryman jumped to his death off the Washington Avenue bridge in Minneapolis on January 7, 1972 (“he tilted out and let go” in biographer Paul Mariani’s phrasing). Bellow was at that time several hundred pages into the writing of Humboldt’s Gift.

In his introduction to Recovery (1973), Berryman’s unfinished and posthumously published novel, Bellow quotes from that last letter and remembers his friend of twenty years:

What he said was true: we joined forces in 1953 and sustained each other for many years. . .

His poems said everything. He himself said remarkably little. His songs were his love offerings. These offerings were not always accepted. . . . he snatched up the copy of Love & Fame which he had brought me and struck out certain poems, scribbling in the margins, “Crap!” “Disgusting!” But of one poem, “Surprise Me,” he wrote shakily, “This is certainly one of the truest things I’ve been gifted with.”

I read it again now and see what he meant. I am moved by the life of a man I loved. He prays to be surprised by the “blessing gratuitous” “on some ordinary day.” It would have to be an ordinary day, of course, an ordinary American day. The ordinariness of the days was what it was all about.

Of related interest:

• Patrick Kurp has also blogged about the Berryman-Bellow friendship
• Read an interview with Janis Bellow about the forthcoming publication in November of Saul Bellow: Letters, which will include many of his letters to John Berryman
• Below: A video of John Berryman being interviewed by A. A. Alvarez in 1966 and reading “Dream Song 14,” which begins “Life, friends, is boring”

Related LOA works: John Berryman: Selected Poems; Saul Bellow: Novels 1970-1982

Philip Roth, Albert Camus, and plagues

Philip Roth’s latest novel is receiving widespread critical attention, including a front-page rave in The New York Times Book Review. Literary critic Elaine Showalter (who edited the LOA volume of Louisa May Alcott) writes to us about a literary precedent that many of the reviewers seem to have overlooked:

I’ve been surprised that very few reviewers of Philip Roth’s Nemesis have pointed out that it is a brilliant and compassionate American re-imagining of Albert Camus’s fable, The Plague (1947). Camus’s narrator, later revealed as the enlightened Algerian doctor Bernard Rieux, begins: “the unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- in Oran.” Similarly, Roth sets the unusual events of the polio epidemic in the summer of 1944, in another sweltering port city, “equatorial Newark.” Like Camus, Roth juxtaposes the war and the epidemic to highlight the parallels between the tragic and absurd fate of the young men fighting in France and the Pacific, “because this was real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war—war upon the children of Newark.”

But re-reading The Plague last year, Roth decided to make some significant structural changes for his book. “I could have had a doctor tell it, the way Camus does,” he told The (London) Times. Instead, he made his narrator a polio victim who survives, and his protagonist a young athlete and playground director, Bucky Cantor, who epitomizes the simple values of manliness, sportsmanship, and honor. Bucky’s values are not trivial in the face of panic, fear, persecution, and arbitrary death. Camus, who had been a champion football goalie until he was sidelined by tuberculosis, said in the 1950s “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.” Ultimately, Roth argues, in the spirit of Camus, we are at the mercy of the “malicious absurdity of nature” and live in an indifferent, Godless universe. We create meaning and dignity for ourselves by joining with others in resistance to our fate. With its solid historical context and familiar setting in Jewish Newark, Nemesis is unmistakably a Roth novel, but also a humane and profound fable about the human condition which deserves to be read alongside The Plague.

In a recent post reviewing Nemesis, blogger Mike Ettner also notes the similarities and points out that Roth had mined this material over fifty years ago in a never-published story that he showed to Saul Bellow:

[A] draft short story Roth had shared with Bellow back in 1957 reminded the elder writer, in one respect, of The Plague by Albert Camus, a book Bellow disliked. He warned Roth against writing stories too beholden to a controlling idea: “I have a thing about Ideas in stories. Camus’ The Plague was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion.” . . . And yet there is no mistaking the correspondences between the fictional devastations visited upon the populaces in Camus’ The Plague and Roth’s Nemesis and contemporary or near-contemporary events in Europe.

Nemesis will appear in a future volume of The Library of America’s definitive collection of Philip Roth’s fiction; so far the series has published all the novels and stories through 1995.

Related LOA volumes: Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959–1995

Nobel oblige: Steinbeck predicts a winner, and the burden of winning the Prize

Over at The Literary Saloon, M. A. Orthofer is performing his obligatory annual run-through of likely winners for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which will be announced tomorrow. [Update, 10/7: And the winner is Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.]. Earlier this week, Orthofer wrote at length about Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (currently a professor at the University of California, Irvine), who had been leading the Ladbrokes odds until this morning, when Cormac McCarthy overtook the #1 spot. Other American contenders (according to the oddsmakers, at least) include Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, John Ashbery, and perennial favorite Philip Roth.

This flurry of speculation takes us back nearly half a century, when John Steinbeck proved himself the ablest of prognosticators. Steinbeck received the Prize in Literature in 1962, and he sent a copy of his Nobel lecture to Saul Bellow with the inscription, “You’re next.” And indeed Bellow was the next American to win the prize, in 1976 (in a year Americans swept all the Nobel categories)—although Steinbeck had died eight years earlier and didn’t live to see his prediction come true.

The day the award was announced, the University of Chicago held a press conference (see video below) at which Bellow recalled Steinbeck’s prediction and said: “I knew Steinbeck quite well, and I remember how burdened he was by the Nobel Prize. He felt that he had to give a better account of himself than he had done.” Bellow was of two minds about the prize (“A primitive part of me, the child in me is delighted. The adult in me is skeptical.”); he worried that he might lose his privacy and he graciously acknowledged other writers, including Henry Miller and Christina Stead (neither of whom ever did win), who were equally deserving.



Related LOA works: John Steinbeck: Collected Works 1932–1962 (four volumes);  Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1982 (three volumes)