by Oliva Kan-Sperling

Archway Editions, 164 pp., $14.95

“Gossip is a fearful thing,” wrote the “Chinese Greta Garbo” Ruan Lingyu, before getting her revenge on the tabloids by overdosing on barbiturates at the age of 24. Or so the story goes. In the near-century intervening it’s been speculated that the note was forged after the fact, by Ruan’s tea-tycoon boyfriend Tang Jishan, who hoped to make some kind of public sense of his young lover’s suicide, and maybe clear his own name in so doing.

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“Fanfiction,” writes the novelist Olivia Kan-Sperling in an essay for n+1, “hinges on creating a difference internal to its subject, on alienating us from familiar names and images.” Her latest Little Pink Book: a bad bad novel (Archway Editions), charts the fortunes of Huang Limei, a barista and blogger-musician who—in spite of her apparently vacant nature, or rather thanks to it—is plucked from obscurity and thrust into stardom by a rapey talent agent. Odd-numbered pages are in English. Even-numbered pages contain what I’m told are their Mandarin counterparts, translated by Chen S., but I can only read the former, so I cannot confirm that it’s the same story both ways. Limei could be so much more, or so much less, than I’ve managed to read into her.

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by Emily Witt

Pantheon, 272 pp. $23.20

New Yorker journalist Emily Witt’s autoethnographic memoir Health & Safety is part elegy for the previous decade’s NYC-Berlin rave scene, and part indictment of America in the years leading up to and including Trump’s first term. The book progresses more or less chronologically with brief allusions to her youth when, having witnessed her druggiest childhood peers succumb to a kind of cyclical “self-generated squalor,” she opted for a sobriety compatible with her ambition. At 31, having established a career in journalism but not lasting love, Witt yielded to an interminable ennui that saw her desire for risk redouble, leading to the very squalor she’d previously avoided as she became a casualty of the long 2010s.

Witt makes it evident early on that she feels tread upon—by her biological clock, her want for enduring love, Cons and Neocons, the banks, Second Amendment loyalists, socialites, selfies, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, ecological collapse, civil rights infringement, intractable secularism, and perhaps most of all, the declining relevance and grandeur of her vocation of writing. These pressures, compounded and enmeshed in the 21st century, trigger in Witt (and the rest of her milieu) a defensive pursuit of professional and personal self-optimization more conducive to neuroses than an elusive state of “wellness.”

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“Left-wing or Right-wing, I’m in favor of violence”

—Yukio Mishima, Debate at the University of Tokyo, 13th of May, 1969

A few years ago when I was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, I spent Thanksgiving in the Baltimore suburb of Roland Park where Luigi Mangione graduated from the Gilman School as valedictorian. I was struck by how serene, quaint and architecturally pleasant the neighborhood was, and its resemblance to the idyllic scenes of American suburbia I’d seen in many films. It stood in stark contrast to where I was subletting a room not too far down the road in Hampden, near what I assumed was an addiction clinic for opioid addicts. Not being able to drive, and much to the shock of some colleagues, I often walked to the university and sometimes into the city. Some mornings when walked past the clinic, I would briefly exchange pleasantries with some patients congregating outside chatting and smoking. They seemed a very heterogeneous group of people, and not entirely conforming to the popular perception of drug addicts. I surmised that many had come to addiction and immiseration through the pharmacological route, through medication mis-prescribed by unscrupulous doctors for debilitating pain. I’ve only briefly experienced the type of pain for which such medication is necessary, after a minor surgery, so I can well understand how more constant, intense and unabating pain could lead to desperation for respite, or the mere ability to function day to day.

Pain is something that psychically transported Mangione from the plush upper-class surroundings of Roland Park to the wretched realties of Hampden and other parts of the city—that is to say, from one insulated and exclusive American existence, to one more exposed, vulnerable and universal. The manifesto which Mangione wrote expresses opposition to the parasitism of the health insurance industry, while on another level conveying some degree of loyalty to authority. He was educated at Ivy League institutions, worked in the tech industry and seemed to have been committed to physical fitness, self-improvement and self-actualization. It’s doubtful we will discover his actual motivations, and its likely there will be a concerted attempt to moderate them. Yet we know that a marked change in his personality and fortunes occurred when he began to suffer from debilitating chronic pain from a spinal injury, with many speculating that he experienced callous treatment by America’s obscene and byzantine health insurance system, and its recent turn towards Artificial Intelligence to assess claims.

In the perplexing case of Mangione we find ourselves confronted with two perennial themes—Pain and Violence, two fundamental features of human experience that are related but distinct, which we scarcely seem to fully understand. They nonetheless hold the key understanding the mollifying nature of modern technological society, and why it increasingly drives men toward acts of extreme retribution—and by looking at a rather odd collection of sources which will include, amongst others, Ernst Jünger, Peter Thiel and Yukio Mishima—we might be able to better understand the nature of the problem.

In his prescient essay On Pain (1934), Ernst Jünger wrote of how an emergent technological society sought to abolish pain and inculcate boredom and complacency, even while demanding greater personal sacrifice to a ruthless economic logic. For Jünger it was a shift from his vaunted aristocratic virtues of honor, pride, and duty to a bourgeois worldview of bare life, self-preservation at all costs:

The growing objectification of our life appears most distinctly in technology, this great mirror, which is sealed off in a unique way from the grip of pain . . . . We are too deeply immersed in this process to comprehend it to its full extent. If one gains even a little distance . . . the claim on life becomes more visible.

For Jünger technology was embodied in the unreality inculcated by the dominance of the photograph (a precursor to our more advanced image culture) which functions as an “expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing . . . a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession.” Drawing on his experience of the First World War—a technological war which brutalized and exterminated an entire generation of young men, leaving countless others maimed physically and psychically—Jünger proposed that the future would be determined by the men who could gain mastery over “pain,” and thus over technological anomie. Pain is the

only measure promising a certainty of insights. Wherever values can no longer hold their ground, the movement toward pain endures as an astonishing sign of the times; it betrays the negative mark of a metaphysical structure.

He continues:

The amount of pain we can endure increases with the progressive objectification of life. It almost seems as if man seeks to create a space where pain can be regarded as an illusion, but in a radically new way.

Despite clearly once being in thrall to the ideas of tech-utopians and despite being fully immersed, like we all are, in this virtual sham existence, perhaps Luigi Mangione could no longer regard his very palpable and excruciating pain as illusory in the accepted palliative ways. Perhaps it began to assume a state conducive to certain insights capable of jolting him from stupefaction into action. In his will to transgress the law, putatively in the service of a higher Law, this brutal assassination ties into what philosophers on the left and the right have long acknowledged forms the basis of “Divine Violence.”

Franco Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015) attempted to inform us of the perturbing effects of technological alienation on the contemporary male subject. The epic hero, Berardi maintained, subjugated nature through strength of will and courage, imposed order, fended off chaos, and founded nation-states. Yet this epic form of heroism has, since the advent of technologies of mass communication in the 20th Century, receded as “the complexity and speed of human events overwhelmed the force of the will”:

When chaos prevailed, epic heroism was replaced by gigantic machines of simulation. The space of the epic discourse was occupied by semiocorporations, apparatuses for the emanation of widely shared illusions. . . .Here lies the origin of the late-modern form of tragedy: at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality, and identities are perceived as authentic forms of belonging. It is often accompanied by a desperate lack of irony, as humans respond to today’s state of permanent deterritorialization by enacting their craving for belonging through a chain of acts of murder, suicide, fanaticism, aggression, and war.

While Berardi’s analysis is somewhat compelling, his call to be conscious of the “simulation at the heart of the heroic game” through the use of “irony” is not at all convincing. The reason for this is generational. Berardi belongs to a cohort of thinkers for whom irony served as the supreme form of radical dissent, or as Richard Rorty suggested, a key concept of “liberal hope” that fosters understanding within democratic societies. The current moment is, however, one oversaturated with irony. It is an irony evident even in its rare expressions of earnestness. But amidst the chaos and detritus of contemporary digital culture, its profusions of “content” and masses of data, its near compulsory principles of self-abjection as self-expression, its multiplicity of subjective forms of “justice,” and its hyper-politicized public sphere where political engagement for some reason lacks efficacy, there still exists a singular and burning desire for authenticity.

According to a certain chronology, the modern era of the mass shooter began with the spectacle of Columbine in the late ’90s. Back then, the perpetrators of mass shootings once came from America’s cultural hinterlands, before moving increasingly into the cultural centers. Now they are increasingly found beyond its physical borders, and the reach of this anomic male violence is as vast as the internet itself; its perpetrators’ capacity for violent retribution unbounded and seemingly objectless. Deranged by a slavish addiction to technology, incapable of distinguishing between virtuality and actuality, the political class has complacently assumed that these young men will continue to commit ever more horrific acts of mass violence, but instead of attempting to address root causes, have instead made them part of a cynical calculation. They were aided in this calculation by the fact that the psycho-sexual motivations behind these atrocities seemed so incoherent, paltry, and completely undeserving of sympathy.

One of the most influential works of political philosophy in the twentieth century is George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908), which inspired revolutionary movements across both the left and right in the volatile post-WWI era. In the course of his career Sorel was associated with liberalism, conservatism, the reactionary ideas of Action Française and Charles Maurras, latterly with Marxism, and eventually with Anarcho-Syndicalism. Sorel believed violence to be the primary creative force of history, the best means to counteract the complacency of bourgeois centrist plutocracies and their favored ‘democratic’ forms of government. The General Strike was for Sorel a highly aestheticized form of symbolic violence, motivated by a sense of divine justice. In contradistinction to the violence of the State:

Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

Significant here is that Sorel considers this potent form of violence symbolic. The distinction was further elaborated by Walther Benjamin as the difference between “mythical” violence and “divine” violence, in which we may find echoes of recent events:

God is opposed to myth in all spheres, so divine violence runs counter to mythic violence. Indeed, divine violence designates in all respects an antithesis to mythic violence. If mythic violence is law-positing, divine violence is law-annihilating. . . . Mythic violence is blood-violence over mere life for the sake of violence itself; divine violence is pure violence over all of life for the sake of the living.

A little more recently, Slavoj Žižek responded to Benjamin’s critique:

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei . . . as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. . . . If it is extra-moral, it is not “immoral.”

Many view Mangione’s action through the prism of this type of revolutionary “divine” violence: Yet its brutal characteristics—far removed from the symbolic violence of the General Strike which for Sorel served Civilization—bear some resemblance to the mythical variety of “blood-violence over mere life for the sake of violence itself.” In this sense, Sorel’s choleric work still has much to say about the present, evidenced by the sophisticated social, political and technological controls still used to counteract revolutionary violence.

Some of those responsible for upholding these controls regard the current era of the mass shooter in the terms of a “Sacrificial Crisis” as described by René Girard in his Violence and the Sacred (1972). Girard maintained that mimetic violence and vengeance—i.e. copycat violence—would proliferate when the rites and rituals once used to keep them in check no longer functioned. In the absence of the surrogate sacrificial victim—or a system of ritual or religious practice which can mimic this function—the “contagion” of reciprocal violence would spread mercilessly through human communities, eventually leading to their implosion and destruction. The sense of distance from this brutal atavistic reality created by technology in advanced “civilized” societies has, according to Girard, lulled us into a false sense of security:

We have managed to extricate ourselves from the sacred somewhat more successfully than other societies have done, to the point of losing all memory of the generative violence; but we are now about to rediscover it. The essential violence returns to us in a spectacular manner— not only in the form of a violent history but also in the form of subversive knowledge. This crisis invites us, for the very first time, to violate the taboo that neither Heraclitus nor Euripides could ever quite manage to violate, and to expose to the light of reason the role played by violence in human society.

In this enigmatic conclusion, Girard’s essentially pessimistic worldview comes to the fore. Significantly it is one which continues to exert significant influence on contemporary thought. In 2007 the entrepreneur and writer Peter Thiel penned an essay in an obscure academic book series dedicated to René Girard, whom he had followed in his Stanford days. Written in succinct and eloquent prose, “The Straussian Moment” gives Thiel’s account of the impasse presented to the West by the terrorist attacks of September 11th as seen through the work of John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Girard himself. Thiel contends that the central assumptions of the Enlightenment were forms of retreat. Forged in the long shadow cast by the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia, the emergence of liberal democracy resulted from a compromise. The enlightenment values which underpin contemporary democratic ideas are based upon an agreement to defer fundamental questions about the truths of human nature, rather than a system of optimum governance modeled on those truths:

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature.

In his brief discussion Thiel also takes account of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) focusing on Schmitt’s discussion of the concomitant processes of hyperpoliticization/depoliticization that precede the later emergence of a “Total State”:

[I]f civil war should forever be foreclosed in a realm which embraces the globe, then the distinction of friend and enemy would also cease. What remains is neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc.

For Thiel, the Total State which Schmitt describes is, from one perspective, something to aspire to, and one eminently achievable through the intervention of technology:

The world of “entertainment” represents the culmination of the shift away from politics. A representation of reality might appear to replace reality: instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be “intrigue of all sorts,” as in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death.

Thiel recounts how Schmitt regarded the potential emergence of such an artificial world through technological faith as the malevolent work of the Antichrist; a world of tenuous peace and security that will briefly reign before “the final catastrophe.” Although conceding that the “price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high,” what are we to make of Thiel’s involvement in funding and supporting various companies that have helped engender the contemporary supremacy of these same artificial representations? The answer is to be found in the tension that exists between the thought of Leo Strauss and Girard in relation to the role of violence in human societies. Strauss, Thiel maintains, does not necessarily disagree with Girard—but is in no way bound by Girard’s Catholic universalism, and is loyal only to the interests of an initiated elite. It is, Thiel maintains, a question of timeliness:

For Strauss as for Nietzsche, the truth of mimesis and of the founding murder is so shocking that most people, in all times and places, simply will not believe it. The world of the Enlightenment may have been based on certain misconceptions about the nature of humanity, but the full knowledge of these misconceptions can remain the province of a philosophical elite. The successful popularization of such knowledge would be the only thing to fear. . . .

Thiel ends on a note of ambivalence. The modern age may well not be “permanent,” but it has not yet come to an end and there is no telling how long it will endure. In the meantime, it is better to “side with peace” over violence. And even though one day “all will be revealed,” and all injustices will eventually be “exposed” and the perpetrators “held to account”—the decisions made by those who rule will “determine the destiny” of the world to come. In one reading, Thiel’s proposition advocates for the technological Total State and its various forms of entertainment qua mass deception and control as a means to hold back the “limitless violence of a runaway mimesis,” thereby ensuring the rule of a powerful esoteric elite. In another it reads as a noble and benevolent strategy aimed at preventing wanton violence for the maintenance of peace and order for as many people as possible, for as long as possible. In both readings what is clear is that Thiel, in his dual role as religious pessimist and libidinal engineer, is unequivocal in his belief that the sine qua non of any form of elite domination over the masses is the ability to place controls upon violence.

An examination of Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account is telling for a number of reasons. Yet little attention has been given to the clear disparity between the books he read, and those which he aspired to read. The former, less numerous, category is filled with work of popular sociology and psychology, economics, dietary advice, meme-tier cultural criticism, self-help, and genre fiction. The latter contains some dense philosophical and literary, work which can be regarded as “improving” in the best sense. The difference speaks to the struggle faced by many in distinguishing between virtuality and actuality, between a stultifying and immiserating technological society that only offers the consolation and justification for pain, against the hope for a world in which the suffering of Pain is to be endured if it approaches higher principles.

Mangione’s review of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, curiously located in the former category, is telling on many levels:

While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.

And further, apparently paraphrasing a “take” he found online, he states that Kaczynski:

Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him. When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.

To understand the import of these statements, it would be useful to turn to an excellent yet obscure philosophical text written in 1998 by Eric Krakauer, erstwhile philosophy scholar and now a physician and Professor of Medicine at Harvard medical school. In this text, Krakauer provides a valuable diagnosis of the insurmountable problem posed by the dialectic of technology:

Technology has progressively turned the technologically generated autonomous human subject into a heteronomous object for technological domination. This reversion has occurred as the technologies of the culture industry have totalized a certain mode of thinking. The same technological or “dispositive thinking” with which the subject masters nature now enslaves the subject as it totalizes both itself and society.1

The only possible antidote to such a grave prognosis will come by embracing what novelist and firebrand Wyndham Lewis’s called the stalled revolution of the Luddites. The Luddite movement was not a mere paroxysm of lumpen discontent, borne of fear and ignorance, and misdirected towards what Karl Marx dismissed as the “material instruments” of production rather than its modes. The Luddites’ primary grievance was not with the form of machinery itself, nor towards a technology they did not understand (indeed many of them were highly skilled machine operators). Rather, it was with the ways in which the threat of technology was being exploited by a parasitic ownership class to degrade working conditions. Over the course of time, within the popular imagination, as is evident in Mangione’s reference, the term has become derisory. To be a Luddite is to be ignorant and fearful of technological progress whilst nostalgic for an illusory past. For Lewis, however, the technological revolution began not with the invention of machines but with the Luddites’ demand that the machine be subjugated to human needs. He saw within their attacks against modes of production which favored machines, the struggle for human subjectivity over heteronomous technological subjugation.

Lewis’s first-hand experience of the First World War cauterized his opposition to what was previously a fascinated ambivalence toward technological advancement. In common with Lewis, I believe that an insistence upon the fundamental incompatibility of man and machine does not signal a naïve desire to return to a mythical prelapsarian past. It is rather a weary insistence that all fantasies of machinic desire spring from a profoundly damaged consciousness, that any temporary easing of the burden of human existence that comes from elevating machines to sentience, will never replace what will be irrevocably be lost.

I believe we must draw a strong distinction between what I call the “normative” and “recidivist” forms of masculinity, the former eminently worthy of repurposing and revitalization—the latter immeasurably transgressive and destructive. A public discourse which refuses to make such distinctions and relies instead on journalistic platitudes will mean that an honest, and necessary, account of masculinity’s relationship to violence will continue to elude us. Most seemingly cannot break free from a form of analysis that views all expressions of an (undifferentiated) masculinity as retrograde and inculpatory ad initio; something to be acknowledged only grudgingly, if not eventually effaced and dismantled altogether. Social constructivist perspectives such as these are widespread, but they will find difficulty in explicating the rise in chaotic violence as more recidivist subjects are created by the untrammelled anomie of the technological quotidian. An honest account will derive only from a re-consideration of violence itself and its role as a form of symbolic power which can, if properly conceived and sublimated, potentially be made to serve productive ends.

The grim alternative can be envisioned by considering the enigmatic pronouncements of Yukio Mishima, who declared himself in favor of violence whether of the left or the right. Mishima’s statement was no mere provocation but an attempt at mediation. Speaking to a packed auditorium of communist and socialist student radicals—some of whom openly declared that they only came to see him beaten to death—Mishima’s comment alluded to the power of violence as (divine) potentiality, as a point of commonality between the radical students’ struggle for revolution and his own quest to make his life into a work of art. It remains a difficult lesson for us to grasp, but an essential one nonetheless. Arguably one of the most gifted aesthetes in the modern Japanese tradition, from a young age Mishima expressed a morbid fixation with death, which he was ultimately unsuccessful in containing only within his remarkable body of work. In the lead up to his theatrical coup d’etat in 1970, Mishima had himself photographed by Kishin Shinoyama in a series called “Death of a Man.” He posed in various mythically violent scenarios; drowning in mud in one, with a hatchet embedded in his head in another; crushed under the wheels of a truck in the next, then as Saint Sebastian dying in ecstatic agony from his arrow wounds which evoked the famous renaissance painting by Guido Reni, and finally as a Samurai committing Seppuku. In the end Mishima chose the mimesis of profane violence. This is the path of recidivist masculinity. Self-reflexive, self-aggrandizing and self-mythologizing—we must always remember that he could only attain his so-called “beautiful” death under the camera eye of technological subjugation, a maddeningly cruel gaze which today has become an all-encompassing panopticon. Against the power of this monstrous inhuman monolith, death may seem like a welcome reprieve. But it is always much harder for a man to keep living, to preserve life, than it is to destroy it. It remains possible to harness the symbolic power of “divine” violence, to reject the call for mythic violence which exists only for its own sake. The solution might be found in Sorel’s view of the General Strike, an act of collective symbolic violence which ultimately serves the interests of civilization, and prevents the descent into barbarism.

by Matthew Davis

Arcade, 288 pp., $21.84

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Vivienne: a Novel

by Emmalea Russo

Arcade, 247 pp. $20.95

It's not unusual to feel like the New York art world is detached from the common fundament of humanity. Andy Warhol is an iconic example: cool, ironic, above-it-all. Yet, secretly, beneath this impassive façade, Warhol was a devout Byzantine Catholic, who volunteered in a soup kitchen and attended Mass regularly. Lifting the veil like this is helpful. It gives us a sense that behind all the surreal antics and advanced concepts, artists are also people suffering through the same tragicomic round of birth, copulation, and death—while seeking escape from it.

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Patchin Place: The Powyses and Literary New York

by Raymond Crozier

Independently Published, 285 pp., $10.99

Raymond Crozier’s Patchin Place: The Powyses and Literary New York, recently reissued in paperback, might be less unusual for its subject matter—the luminaries and semi-luminaries of New York Bohemia who inhabited the gated row of three-storey townhouses facing the present Jefferson Market Library on West Tenth Street—than for its choice of focus. The Powyses of the title refers to Llewelyn Powys, an expatriate Anglo-Welsh novelist who lived at Patchin Number 4, and his sister Marian, a lacemaker, but above all to their elder brother John, the novelist, mystic philosopher, and lecturer, who took over his brother’s flat in 1924 and spent just short of eight years there, though he mainly used it as a base from which to crisscross the country, lecturing on subjects ranging from Dickens and Dostoevsky to modern poetry and Plato’s Eros. Why, instead of better-known Patchin residents such as Djuna Barnes or E. E. Cummings, did Crozier focus on John Cowper Powys?

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The answer is partly personal: Crozier, a retired psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales, has long admired Powys and was drawn to Patchin by that interest. (As a specialist in the study of blushing and creativity, his attraction to the shameless and fecund Powys perhaps requires little explanation.) And yet a gracenote toward the end of the book suggests a deeper affinity. Letting his mind wander over the tree whose boughs Powys would have looked out at from the upper-floor room he shared with his lover Phyllis, Crozier wonders:

If the ailanthus leaves could speak, what would they tell us about comings and goings among the residents of the alley and their visitors? The conflict within the Patchin family at the end of the nineteenth century that reaches the courts, where a young woman resident in France sues her father for her share of the properties? The production [sic] of Dudley Digges’ production of Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold at midnight on July 1, 1918, that stopped the trains on the elevated railway on Sixth Avenue? Jessie Tarbox Beals and Berenice Abbott setting up their heavy photographic equipment some twenty years apart?

Besides being a clever way of recapping the book, which begins with property development and proceeds to canvass New York’s first “downtown scene” of the 1920s and ’30s, complete with political operatives (then mostly of the radical and anarchist Left) and private theater (then sufficiently well-connected to halt public transport so as not to disturb the performance), this reverie is deeply in tune with John Cowper’s unique sense of place.

As the author himself put it in A Glastonbury Romance, his great novel of the 1930s, begun at Patchin, “Human thoughts, those mysterious projections from the creative nuclei of living organisms, have a way of radiating from the brain that gives them birth.” What allowed the lowlands around Glastonbury—that womblike receptable of spiritual yearnings and creeds—to manifest the Holy Grail to him is the same phenomenon that made it possible for “any supermaterial eye endowed with psychic perception” to perceive the psychic residues, or “thoughtshapes,” left at the scene of any human encounter. Powys regularly conveyed not just the emanations, but the perspectives, both of human characters (living and dead) and an array of non-human entities, from the cosmic (e.g., the sun, or “the divine-diabolical First Cause of all life”) to the decidedly earthly, including, yes, trees, and even stones.

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Sillyboy: A Novel

by Peter Vack

C4g Books, 250 pp., $13.60

I learned of Peter Vack’s Sillyboy the same way I get most of my news, by reading the lolcow forums—anonymous message boards dedicated to gossiping about very minor celebrities. Vack frequently appears as a subject of commentary and slander on the threads dedicated to ‘leftcows’: people who are in some way connected to the ‘postleft’ podcasting circuit, Dimes Square, or otherwise live in New York and feel unconflicted about saying ‘retard.’ Lolcows is 4-chan meets Us Weekly for lonely millennial women. You can find actor-influencers Pariah the Doll and Ivy Wolk self-posting (committing cyber-selfharm) and almost feel digital culture reporter Katherine Dee lurkingly taking notes for her latest musings on how the internet is, like, totally changing everything. The shit-posters at the lolcow-leftcow threads are not fans of Vack, whom they allege to have a thinning hairline and to look at himself in the mirror during sex. Pretty low-stakes stuff, as far as problematic authors go!

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Creation Lake: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

Scribner, 416 pp., $26.05

In his Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes that in times of war, the real fight has almost nothing to do with soldiers in trenches staring across no-man’s land at each other. The true battle is the clash between the soldiers and the military policemen on their own side, the soldiers’ desperate attempts to get out of the conflict and the military policemen’s sadistic efforts to stop them.

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The clash between writer and critic is maybe less primal than that between grunt and military policeman, but not by much. What a critic (or, if we’re being real, some very high percentage of readers) is actually doing when he or she reads literary fiction is not looking to be entertained. What critics are up to has to do with the complex zone of envy, resentment, and vindictiveness between themselves and the book under review—and which is a review’s real subject. The writer of the book has already been chosen, already been placed on some kind of pedestal. The writer may have had earlier, well-regarded books. This newest book reaches the critic as if on a triumphant litter at the end of a long procession— proceeded already by the glowing blurbs, by the first round of reverential reviews.

The critic tries very hard to be open-minded. The critic—after all—is only a critic because of a life-long, excruciating love of reading. But the critic is also a writer—a writer almost always with less prestige than the writer who has the book under review —and the critic is wondering, above all else, why that should be the case, why the writer has the reputation that they do or whether there might be some cosmic error afoot. The critic is perfectly willing to find and acknowledge some new masterpiece—part of what the critic is inwardly prepared to do as they start a book is to render obeisance to someone who proves themselves a better writer than they are. But that’s really not what the critic is itching to do as the starting-gun goes off—what the critic is hoping for is for the acclaimed writer to make a fool of themselves, for the acclaimed writer to show him- or herself to the world (with the critic’s assistance) to be an overrated hack. In his heart of heart, the critic’s ultimate desire is for the book to be a failure.

In that sense, Creation Lake was, for me, an immensely satisfying experience.

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The below essay by Rick Moody is not your typical Mars Review piece. For one thing, it’s novella-length: nearly 20,000 words. In fact, I’ve come to think of it as a “non-fiction novella,” perfectly of a piece with the intelligent, sinuous, difficult-to-classify fictional and non-fictional writings Moody has published throughout his thirty-year literary career. Also, it’s not a review of a new book, but a record of an encounter with an old one. But however you view it, “Eclipse Sickness” is a major new work from a major American author—one of our most accomplished literary stylists. It’s an honor to publish it, and I hope you, the reader, will find yourself moved by this work that is both deeply personal and deeply reverent toward the dual mysteries of life and art.

—Noah Kumin

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1.           This essay is about how your grandfather, my dad, who is presently ill, used to read a certain passage from Moby Dick aloud to us, my brother, my sister, and myself, often on Thanksgiving Day. From the early 1970s, and onward. So many times did he read this passage to us that it became a ritual, in which was partially concealed, I think, a set of beliefs. So many times did your grandfather read the passage that he emerged as a sort of effect of the writing, an inevitability, a fan who had to be, a fan who had to come to pass, so that the passage could be understood properly, which is to say variously, rashly, obscurely, enthusiastically.

2.           The passage your grandfather liked to read aloud was a very short chapter from Moby Dick entitled “The Lee Shore.” It’s chapter 23, the same number assigned to a remarkable psalm of David. It’s a very short chapter in a book with many very short chapters. In fact, these interstitial chapters—these short meditations—are one of the arresting features of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. They offer some ideas about how to organize narrative activity. They indicate that you might, for example, tell a story by heaping up details.

4.           I propose to give you the entirety of “The Lee Shore” to you as I understand it.

5.           Though I’m not entirely sure I understand it.

6.           Or: my understanding is a bit idiosyncratic; or it is likely that my understanding tells you more about me, the exegete, than about Moby Dick. Or it’s possible that the certainty of understanding in any comprehensive way amounts to a kind of delusional self-love. Or: if you understand with your cerebral, rational apparatus you are probably shortchanging your limbic self, where you and your understanding are more about flows, as Deleuze might say. Unfoldings, shadowings, implications, episodes of metanoia. I would prefer to feel a lot about “The Lee Shore,” rather than alleging to “understand” it. But maybe some understanding is an inevitable by-product of limbic engagement.

6.           I propose to interpret all of “The Lee Shore,” for you, line by line, so you can think about it, too, and then, later, you may pass this text onto your own kids. Add whatever you want to this text.

8.           I mean: let’s make living document about this thing we used to read aloud on Thanksgiving. Let’s make it (our inquiry) an open, unmoored thing that we can always shave down or radically expand. The cloud of interpretations ever-changing, kaleidoscopic, mutable, storm-tossed, outflung, with interpretations based in history, based in theology, based in the music of language, beginning where the interpreters are now, or where they might be tomorrow, not where they once were.

9.           However, before I start in on “The Lee Shore,” however, I have an important detour, which will make sense later. I also mean in these pages to talk about eclipses.

10.         So, let it be said: the first time I saw a solar eclipse was on March 7, 1970, which was the eclipse of the longest recorded duration in the United States of America until the recent one, which I think you both witnessed on April 8, 2024.

11.        During the March 7, 1970, solar eclipse I was eight years old and lived in Darien, CT, on Ironwood Lane, with my family—my parents, my siblings, and one black labrador retriever. We had lived at this address, I believe, since anno domini 1965. March was an interesting month in the Moody household, because four members of the extended clan celebrated birthdays in March. My grandfather (who lived in the next town over, Norwalk) had just turned 72, I think, and my brother was about to be 7, my mom and dad were about to be 33 and 35 respectively.

12.       Your great-grandfather, whose name I share, seemed utterly ancient to me then, a fossil of a man, but he was only ten years older than I am now as I write these lines.

13.       March 7 was a Saturday, which means: no school, and the eclipse came at a good time, 1:42 P.M., and my assumption, impossible to corroborate probably, as a significant portion of the cast is no longer living, is that my paternal grandparents, who lived nearby, were present. They were always coming over.

14.       The path of totality of the 1970 eclipse was somewhat offshore the Connecticut coast, near which we lived. And so we were circa 96% as regards the totality of the eclipse. In those days there were no handy three-dollar UV-protecting paper sunglasses. Not that we possessed. And: there had been a week, or weeks, proceeding the eclipse, featuring admonitions about not watching the eclipse, admonitions at school and on the radio, and from my parents, or, at least, from my mother, and so we attempted to fashion one of those cardboard box contraptions on which to see the solar eclipse. The shadow of the shadow.

15.          As with many such things (when you are a child, beholding the goings-on of the adult class of persons) the eclipse hype to which we had been subjected had a corrosive or repellant action. It couldn’t possibly be as good as advertised.

16.          And: I really could not operate my cardboard apparatus and could not ascertain whether I was “seeing it,” the thing I was meant to see, and thus I had a profound wish to look at the eclipse, straight on, and so eventually I did, because our childhood time was a bit unsupervised.

17.          No one was going to stop me!

18.          My glimpse was short. I did not wish to get caught. It was a flash.

19.          Beyond this need to flaunt any good and reasonable medical advice, which luckily had no immediate effect on my eyesight, two things stand out in the recollection of this first eclipse.

20.          First, that there was an awful lot of waiting around.

21.          Second, despite my brief glimpse, the sun, giver of life, is a presence that is never or rarely seen directly, and which is especially notable in its absence, or in the moments that prefigure its absence. We speak the name of the sun, we honor it, we magnify it, and we feel its presence, but we don’t look at it much, especially not when it is thus effaced, and so our interpretation of it relies on secondary evidence, non-beholding.

22.          I want to keep close these paradoxes of eclipse-watching in the pages that follow, while we think about “The Lee Shore.” Effacement, immensity, non-beholding, uncertainty, the sublime.

23.          “Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of.”  This is the how “The Lee Shore” chapter begins, in fact, and it begins straightaway, therefore, with its righteous consideration of what might be known of a man.

24.          Which is not that much.

25.          Curiously, Moby Dick alleges, here, not to know exactly how many chapters ago Bulkington was spoken of. That would be twenty chapters ago. It was in “The Spouter Inn,” chapter three, wherein Ishmael takes a room (sort of—he has to share it, possibly with Bulkington) and eats dumplings and chowder.

26.          What we know first of the narrator and Bulkington, too, is a not-knowingness. “Some chapters back.” As though the earlier depiction of Bulkington, in which he, Bulkington, shadows forth some darker intimations (his mood disorder), isn’t intentionally set up to bear fruit here in chapter 23. Like Melville isn’t doing it this way on purpose.

27.          It’s a distance of almost one hundred pages (in your edition, the leather-bound one, I just checked)—from “The Spouter Inn” to “The Lee Shore.” And: either Melville set this up from the first, or he wrote, in some compositional ecstasy, the rhapsodic chapter 23, and then decided to go back and retrofit the early pages so that Bulkington would ring a slightly muffled bell in the attentive reader’s mnemonic array.

28.          The not-knowing how many chapters back is the beautiful part. “Some chapters back” feels casual, unsanctimonious.

29.          It is often that scholars find a relationship between Melville and the King James translation of the Bible, e.g., or they find a relationship to a certain edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare, from whom Melville is said to have filched regularly. Today I am going to allege instead a relationship to The Cloud of Unknowing, that 14th century religious tract by Anonymous that counsels about an uncertainty with respect to the divine. Uncertainty as a path to wisdom.

30.          Here’s the beginning of chapter five of The Cloud of Unknowing, which makes the virtue of not-knowing plain: “And if ever thou shalt come to this cloud and dwell and work within as I bid thee, thou behoveth as this cloud of unknowing is above thee, betwixt thee and thy God, right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee; betwixt thee and all the creatures that ever be made” (italics mine).

31.          We are talking here too in “The Lee Shore” about forgetting and uncertainty and the shadow that moves across consciousness.

32.          If, e.g., you doubt that my unknowing, or more exactly my temporary knowing of unknowing, is in excess of what is manifested by the mere phrase “some chapters back,” allow me to note additionally further evidence of unknowing in the “Spouter Inn” chapter of Moby Dick, to be found in the exacting, funny, and quite powerful description of the painting or mural to be found in the Spouter Inn of New Bedford, MA, where Ishmael first alights, on his way to boarding the Pequod.

33.          Let me add that the consideration of this painting or mural appears just before the first entrance of the character known as Bulkington who is our subject.

34.          Do you remember this passage?

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could anyway arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last reach the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. —It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. —It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. —It’s a blasted heath. —It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. —It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mastheads.

35.          Beautiful, right? Not only is the painting impossible to read (well, to be accurate it is both possible and impossible), subject to rash and scattershot interpretations, not only is it obscured, but it is written over, perhaps even graffiti’d upon, blackened by all the tobacco smoked in the premises, and so on. It is, perhaps, a thing of purposeful neglect, except that Ishmael wishes in all cases to look upon neglect and to see it afresh, to find shadows in the shadows, the find knowing in not-knowing.

36.          I have had occasion recently to tell students, again, about ekphrasis, poetry in the moment of describing another art form, a rhetorical gesture to which the poet called Homer was much given. (Sometimes at length!) Here we speak of it too. In Ancient Greek the words from which ekphrasis is constructed may also mean: to call a thing by its name. Which means to clear away the ambiguities and to see the work of art in its openness, perhaps.

37.          The painting in the Spouter Inn has no name. And its author in name is like unto the one that composed The Cloud of Unknowing: Anonymous.

38.          The novel called Moby Dick supplies multiple interpretations of the painting, already, in this passage, as shown above, and then discounts them all; it then supplies one more, though without certainty, more through an “aggregation” of rumor.

39.          And: this unnamed painting is a commentary on the novel as a whole, perhaps self-evidently, and the novel is itself a commentary on the painting. Each incomplete, each premonitory. The painting forecasts the end of the story of Moby Dick. The dramatic apex of Moby Dick. The painting forecasts the condition of the novel, the direction of its storytelling. It is a map or legend, but one that describes or inscribes uncertainty.

40.          And yet don’t believe Ishmael (not entirely), don’t believe the narration, don’t believe the account of the painting, don’t believe me. Because there is a breadth of subjectivity there, an error signal of the highly personal.

41.          By the way, one manifestation of unknowing is: Alzheimer’s Disease.

42.          The shadow as it passes across consciousness.

43.          Oh, a relevant question about the first eclipse I saw on March 7, 1970, is: was my father present? In those days my father, when home, often occupied a certain reclining chair in the living room and was often watching sporting events or the news on the television, also in the living room. Except that the sport he most watched was the one associated with the National Football League. And there is no football in March. There would not have been significant news coverage on at 1:42 P.M. In those days there were only a few channels, and the news was broadcast in the evening.

44.          I was perhaps in a state of longing with respect to my father’s presence/absence—in the household, in my life—even though he was sometimes in a foul mood when he was around.

45.          My father, I mean, was and was not around, or that is my perception.

46.          My father was home and not-home.

47.          My father was leeward and windward.

48.          If my father’s parents (your great-grandparents) were present at the eclipse and I was and my brother was and my mother was (manipulating the cumbersome and unworkable cardboard viewing apparatus), would my father not have been there? Even though, with respect to parental supervisory responsibilities, he was no micromanager?

49.          I know, because I have researched, that Melville alludes to the constellations and the night sky very frequently in Moby Dick. It is possible, even, that he alludes to an eclipse without using the word “eclipse,” on the occasion of a monologue by Ahab addressed to the whale itself (see chapter 36).  Some critics think so.

50.          There are many allusions to eclipses, in the canon of Melville as a whole, that suggest moments of clarity, symbolic heft, intertextuality, sublimity, and obfuscation. I will catalogue some below.

51.          In a way, one working hypothesis here is that accounts of eclipses fail to describe anything like an eclipse. The becoming of its shadow. Or: all written or filmic or photographic accounts of an eclipse are not being-in-eclipse, they are being-in-narrative. The description of the eclipse is the way to be certain that you are not being-in-eclipse, which is itself, the eclipse, about time, about being, about meaning, about shadows, but not about documentation. The eclipse can only shadow forth.

52.          As we shall see below in Moby Dick itself, and in Melville’s other works, that there is the sense of language being other than the event described. There is some centrifugal intensity of language, a Charybdis of language, that both tries to pinpoint, and which is its own layer, like the spinning interpretations of a painting of a whaling vessel in the Spouter Inn, and this helixing effect of language is present in any account of an eclipse.

53.          By the way: orcas sank a yacht off the coast of Gibraltar, yesterday.

54.          I haven’t entirely finished the thought about the Spouter Inn chapter. The Spouter Inn constitutes the first mention of Bulkington, the protagonist of the chapter called “The Lee Shore,” which is to say the chapter that your grandfather was so interested in. There’s just this one passage about Bulkington prior to chapter 23. And I can remember coming upon this chapter in high school, “The Spouter Inn,” when first I read Moby Dick, and being really excited; I believe I even telephoned your grandfather to discuss it with him, this my first contact, outside of the home, with Bulkington.

55.          As I noted, the appearance of Bulkington follows the ekphrastic description of the painting. Specifically, he enters as follows: “A tramping of sea-boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch-coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.” 

56.          Among these wild mariners is Bulkington himself, who is then set apart from the others in this way:

57.          “I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of 'Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?' and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.”

58.          All of that to set up the chapter known as “The Lee Shore.” And when that chapter arrives, I would argue, we are inevitably called back to this passage, above, somewhat in perturbation, when remembering that Bulkington’s “reminiscences that did not bring him much joy.” Indeed, that is his uppermost layer.

59.          Throughout this passage I’ve just quoted from, describing the group that enters the Spouter Inn, there is a further prefiguration of “The Lee Shore,” in which it is implied that Bulkington, and the others, do not want to “touch down” on the land.

60.          And this in turn reminds us of the very beginning of Moby Dick, chapter one, the passage in which Ishmael indicates that he again sets out for the sea whenever he finds himself chasing after funeral processions. The sea, he says, as opposed to the “pistol and the ball.” All around the island of Manhattan, e.g., there are the sailors fixed in their reveries upon the sea. (And this in turn reminds me of the many biographical descriptions of Melville, during his later customs-inspector years, going for long, solitary walks around Manhattan, as if fleeing the consolations of family and home.)

61.          Once returning home, these mariners, in the inn, again set out again. In a circuitous set of laps through their episodic dysthymia.

62.          Upon alighting in civilization, these set out again away.

63.          This is the Bulkington we have in mind, when we get to chapter 23, for whom “the land seemed scorching to his feet.”

64.          Having established the reiteration of the material from the Spouter Inn, then, the action of “The Lee Shore” begins in earnest, right after the opening, “Some chapters back one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the Inn.”

65.          And I can hear these next lines now, truly, as though your grandfather is reading them aloud, with a roast turkey and an abundance of side dishes arrayed in front of him, turnip, rutabaga, and/or parsnips.

66.          “When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!”

67.          Okay, which winter’s night, you might ask, is the one in which we find ourselves. Yes, Chapter 23 appears right after the chapter called “Merry Christmas,” so it’s that kind of shivering winter’s night. Christmas is more or less exactly when the Pequod sets out from Nantucket. So Bulkington, of all people, seems to be at the helm from the first of the voyage. (All of this before Ahab has even left his cabin, in the “Quarter Deck” scene, chapter 36.)

68.          Ishmael reiterates in “The Lee Shore:” the man who had just set down from a “four-year’s dangerous voyage,” and now ventures forth again, immediately.

69.          “The land seemed scorching to his feet.”

70.          Then, this character work having been performed, the poetry of chapter 23 commences immediately hereafter.

71.           “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.”

72.          Three immense sentences (conjoined with semi-colons), with implications for us, as readers, and for all of our national literature. The intimation of loss.

73.          Let’s think about what breaches here.

74.          Are the “wonderfullest” things really always unmentionable? Is that unvarying, as implied here? (And/or, is this thought reversible? Are unmentionable things generally the wonderfullest?) And what do we mean by “unmentionable” exactly? Things that cannot be said, or things that should not be said? Is it a normative thing, here? Is there a sociology of the mentioning? Or is it simply not physically possible?

75.          Perhaps this the tri-partite first sentence of this “proem” section of “The Lee Shore” is simply a restatement of the opening sentence (if slightly obverse) of the Tao Te Ching. If it is beyond saying then you are on the true path.

76.          I imagine this entire essay, over and over, is simply wrestling with the idea at the heart of Ahab’s monologue in the “Quarter Deck” chapter. “Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed— there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.” This passage—“wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable”—feels here like a first pass.

77.          Additionally, these oscillations—between the nameless way and the true way, between the wonderful and the unmentionable, between the uppermost manifestation and the hidden symbol—prefigure the Heraclitus fragment that Heidegger loved so much:

78.          Nature loves to hide.

79.          In the first sentence of the proem of “The Lee Shore,” what is most wonderful (or wonderfullest) is that thing that cannot be stated. The nature of what is is what can’t be narrated. Like what lies beneath the surface of the sea.

80.          This first clause in the proem is followed by “Deep memories yield no epitaphs.”

81.          This, as distinct from what comes before it, “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” is a psychological observation, rather than an epistemological one.  

82.          Here, I imagine, Melville is directly reconjoining us to the first item in this catalogue of three, restating. “Yields no epitaphs,” that is, connects us back to “the unmentionable,” which precedes it. But “epitaph” is also premonitory in the sense that it is the first semi-explicit announcement of Bulkington’s death.

83.          Did I already say that Bulkington dies? He dies.

84.          Whose memories, though, are the “deep memories” here? In a way, they are Ishmael’s, as this “six-inch chapter” (which we encounter in the third portion of the proem sentence) is his elegy to Bulkington, he who was once tall, melancholy, Southern, afflicted. There is no further mnemonic material, not directly speaking, nor any further biographical material, given. Bulkington is like the Janet Leigh character in Psycho. He appears in order to be sacrificed. His grave is “stoneless” not only in that it is at sea, but also in that it is formless generally, beyond narration.

85.          Wait, his death is at sea?

86.          When I first heard this chapter read aloud, when I first learned of its grandly fashioned “dark romantic” dialectical exegesis of windward vs. leeward, home vs. the unknown, I didn’t know to expect the loss at the center of the chapter, I didn’t know it was about grief, I didn’t know it was about death, I didn’t know my father was going to read aloud to us about a death for thirty or forty years, or further, that he was going to revel in the intense complexity of this death.

87.          Yes, the death here is not dramatized. It is lamented after the fact.

88.          Bulkington, as others do, later in the novel, has drowned. (I think.) By the time Ishmael gets to telling of him. Upon first encountering, I was surprised at how quickly my father, your grandfather, passed over this announcement of Bulkington’s drowning. As though it were not central. As though it were not the very material, the exhibit A, of the twenty-third chapter.

89.          So, let us recap: this character is introduced in chapter two, as though he might be central to the text, and then in this the only other mention of him in the lengthy entirety of Moby Dick we learn that he has already drowned?

90.          What gives?

91.          Many commentators have discussed this abrupt sacrifice of Bulkington, and a popular formulation (Andrew Delbanco, e.g.) seems to be that Melville may have had a larger plan in mind for Bulkington, only to give the greater part of this role to Starbuck (another character counterposed against Captain Ahab, in, e.g., “The Quarter Deck”), and, thus, Bulkington was no longer needed. Melville threw him over the side.

92.          In this view, Melville just never got around to cutting Bulkington out of the “Spouter Inn,” or the novel generally, and so he made this chapter to do the excision for him.

93.          The implication here would be that Melville functionally wrote only one draft of the book, and then just left the work in the condition it was in.

94.          This argument, if I understand it properly, is contemptible to me, because it doesn’t allow the novel to be in the non-continuous, unpredictable form that it is in. It doesn’t allow it to push against conventional story expectation. It doesn’t allow it to be discontinuous, postmodern, fragmentary, elliptical, allusive, unfinishable. It doesn’t allow for the refusal to tell the story in the conventional way (as an adventure story), to be a most consequential aspect of what Moby Dick is about, a search without a completion, a story incremental in its process and recess. And: it doesn’t allow us to see the elegy to Bulkington, and his violent absence from the text thereafter, as a strength, rather than as a fragmentary weakness.

95.          I think it is a strength.

96.          At sea, especially in the 19th century, all the characters are in danger of being lost.

97.          Death is everywhere at sea, loss is everywhere, in the literature thereof, and the non-being of death, the annihilation of being lost at sea, is especially part of the dark foretelling of a line like: “Deep memories yield no epitaphs.” There is no more to say of Bulkington, the line implies, because his elegy heralds him as the unheraldable. The forgotten. The memorialized-in-the-process-of-being-forgotten Bulkington, the footnote to the tale that is centrally arrayed with footnote-like digressions.

98.          The disappearance of Bulkington from the text is the disappearance of Bulkington into the sea, or the reverse of the disappearance of Bulkington into the sea is the announcement about how disappearance works textually. As with the sea, things disappear into Moby Dick and are unheard from again, epitaphless.

99.          Many has been the time, in the fifty or so years since I first paused over this chapter enough to consider what was being said to me, or in the decades since I first closely read the novel, that I have wondered exactly what happened to Bulkington. I mean: I have wondered about the details.

100.       He went over the side, but we don’t know if it was accidental or not. With Pip, the cabin boy, when he is fished out of the water (later in the narrative, in chapter 93), we know the details more completely. Pip’s story has an event, a development, an aftermath. He has fallen into the ocean, he has been rescued (though he perhaps thought he would not be), and, upon being rescued, he has “gone insane,” which is how some critics have it (see below), which is not the right idea at all.

101.       Pip’s struggle is with immensity. Pip is a becoming-one-with-immensity, with expanse. Pip is becoming-shadow. Pip is experiencing metanoia, unknowing, crisis.

102.       Pip’s struggle is like eclipse sickness. The struggle with the eclipse is a struggle with scale, as it discloses itself.

103.       In Bulkington’s case, we know none of this. We don’t know with certainty if he was washed over the side, or if he chose to go over the side.

104.       “The Spouter Inn,” which describes Bulkington as harboring some variety of internal anguish (his mood disorder), could be understood to make a case that Bulkington elected to fall into the ocean. It would be a reasonable supposition. As I have known, alas, some number of persons for whom the giving up of hope was their end stage of being, I have seen the dark foreboding ahead of the deed. There is, often, a trajectory, knowable and unknowable.

105.       The other notion, in Bulkington’s case, an accidental death, is also possible.

106.       Ishmael’s most direct accounting is as follows: “Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.”

107.       And what does this accounting tell us specifically? Well, one thing it tells us is that an extended metaphor about the “storm-tossed ship” follows directly, and it further tells us that this extended metaphor, while very beautiful, will not involve straightforward narrative details.

108.       Is Bulkington, lost at sea, like the storm-tossed ship? But how exactly? Because the book is intent on non-traditional inscription of this character, it will fare with Bulkington as with a narrative of structured absence, where in his absence is a hole in the text which causes us to think about what there is to learn from such a hole, a hole that is everywhere implied, but always elided.

109.       I say he jumped.

110.       If he had fallen over the side, on what basis is that drama not included in the narrative of Melville’s novel? As you know, a lot of Moby Dick has nothing to do with advancing the story, not in the way we might expect, were we reared on, e.g., a British 19^th century novel. Like Middlemarch, or Can You Blame Her? Indeed, the story of Moby Dick can be understood as a prolonged and loving and most enthusiastic investigation of all that appears to be non-story. The scene in which Bulkington is washed over the side, ergo, is unsurprisingly suppressed, is part of a systematizing of non-disclosure and narrative uncertainty, a cloud of novelistic unknowing.

111.       (Not long after “The Lee Shore,” e.g., we get an exhaustively Aristotelian catalogue of types of whales in “Cetology,” maybe six or seven times as long as “The Lee Shore,” which chapter is more about performance-of-taxonomy than it is about a story.)

112.       There is more to add: “Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship that miserably drives long the leeward land.” There’s a lot to tackle here. The compositional assumption appears to be that we the readers of Moby Dick would naturally recognize the threat inherent in the predicament of the store-tossed ship, and especially as regards its proximity to shore, and thus the simile—that Bulkington fared like the storm-tossed ship.

113.       And yet “Let me only say . . .” implies “Let me not say more than this,” and this is not unlike the prior formulation, in the proem, “wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” that is: this meaning is more productive, more useful, more profound, when it is wreathed in allusion and evasion.

114.       So it fared with Bulkington that he, himself, foundered on the rocks? Like a ship? In the matter of his life? Which kind of rocks, exactly? Actual rocks? Or purely allegorical rocks? The stony and barbaric shore which is regret, which is trauma, which is despond? Which is theological? Which is historical? Which is all shadowing forth in him of shadows when first he is mentioned in the shadowy Spouter Inn?

115.       We know only that he is lost.

116.       The second total eclipse I personally witnessed, as you both know, having been present, was in Oregon, not long before that acute marker of history, that line in the sand, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our personal witnessing was on Cannon Beach, just west of Portland by ninety minutes or so. The date was August 21, 2017.

117.       What a simpler time that looks like now! Though no eclipse-witnessing is simple.

118.       My recollection is that Cannon Beach was just shy of a total solar eclipse, at about 98% total. Perhaps I was already beginning to have my counterproductive and unreasonable wish to see 100%, no matter what it took.

119.       The family members who were present for the Cannon Beach eclipse-viewing included: the four of us (myself, your mother (or stepmother) Laurel, the two of you), Grampa Neil, a.k.a., Laurel’s Dad, Uncle Nick, a.k.a., Laurel’s brother, and, in my recollection at least, your cousin Jackson. We were well equipped because nearly everyone on this eclipse roster was the kind of person who was going to have all the necessary gear, including multiple pairs of eclipse-viewing spectacles. Our number featured one former Eagle Scout. Granola bars. Bottled water. A first-aid kit. A shovel. Insect repellant. Garments that could be torn and fashioned into tourniquets if necessary. I remember that, you, Hazel Moody, who would have been eight years old, brought a book and read quite a bit while we were there and had to be pried loose from the book at the apex of the eclipse.

120.       Cannon Beach may have not been in the path of totality, but it was, assuredly, a great spot for eclipse viewing, as it is a great spot under almost any circumstances.

121.       For the purposes of understanding eclipse #2, it would be essential to describe the setting, viz., Haystack Rock, a preternatural feature of Cannon Beach. Haystack Rock is a large geological formulation just off Cannon Beach, though saying it is “just off” Cannon Beach is to cause words to under-represent, because it depends on the hour, on the day, and it depends on what you think “on the beach” really means. There are some tidal pools between you and Haystack Rock. At least sometimes. This is all relative.

122.       What is the beach is a taxonomical question that, in a way, cannot be answered.

123.       The beach in Oregon is of a scale, of an immensity, that persons from the East Coast cannot quite prepare for it. Cannon Beach makes the beaches I visited as a child (Weed Beach of Darien, CT) look like little homely sandboxes by comparison. The beach in Oregon dwarfs the individual. And: its scale draws you toward it, nonetheless. The beach feels as though it can’t be traversed, or really known. Just the immediate part of Cannon Beach is miles long and so vast, even at high tide, that it engulfs identity, subjectivity, context. A human is swallowed into the available space of Cannon Beach and rendered puny and masticable. And because it’s the northern Pacific Coast, and the water is much chillier there, Cannon Beach’s adjacent waters are basically intolerable except to the intrepid; Cannon Beach is not known for swimming. People are moving around on Cannon Beach, on the sandy part, sometimes on bikes, horses, even in the occasional automotive vehicle. There are just a few swimmers, in wet suits.

124.       Still, to say all of this is to understate the impact of Haystack Rock.

125.       I can tell you some factual stuff, the kind that Melville would adduce in a catalogue-oriented chapterlet, that Haystack Rock is apparently 235 feet tall, and has quite a bit of verdure, grass, as the top, but is otherwise somewhat sheer. It is shaped like a haystack, I suppose, and is often completely surrounded by water, rough seas, and bits of it have been sheered off, by the epochs, on every side. It is somewhat occluded by ropes and barriers, certain portions, during low tide, to keeps the humans away from nesting seabirds, among which are puffins, which I know because there is a birding guide there, on related signage. There used to be a great many starfish around the rock (when first I traveled there in 2012 or so), but, it seems to me, there are fewer now. There are spots along the perimeter of Haystack that are cave-like, if not entirely caves, erosions, as it were. And here’s a factual tidbit, last summer when we were visiting, there were signs at Haystock Rock telling you that there had been a mountain lion sighted at or on the rock recently. Really? You, malevolence of the wild, carnivore of the wild, have all those thousands of acres of forest for your territory just inland from the coast, where there is, in all likelihood, abundant wildlife, elk, etc., snacking options, and instead you want to amble past the beach cottages to see what you can eat on Haystack Rock? Out of which peculiar dietary impulse? You just really want some shellfish?

126.       Haystack Rock is not extant in this attempt to write its features, however, because there is an element of such immensity that exceeds description, which is perhaps the very definition of immensity or the sublime. Haystack Rock always causes a gasp no matter when you behold it. Somehow as you walk away from Haystack Rock, it nonetheless continues to grow larger, rather than diminishing, and similarly, at least in its nearest vicinity, it is impossible to walk away from it. It walks alongside you, like a heavenly body.

127.       Haystack Rock is composed of volcanic leavings.

128.       Haystack Rock is part of a volcanic flow from the Columbia River drainage basin.

129.       Which establishes it as an ancientness.

130.       Still, these facts do not describe Haystack Rock’s complete dominance of the greater Cannon Beach area, by which I mean not just the beach, but the surrounding community (with its wealth of presidential street names, Jackson, Van Buren, et al.). It’s as though everything in Cannon Beach happens either in a position of immediate adjacency to the “rock,” or else is in some state of brief deferral before returning to the “rock.” I, the narrator of this passage, will go get a cappuccino in order that I can then return to the beach and see the rock anew. I will go for a hamburger, and then I will return to the beach to see the rock. Etc. Nothing happens on the beach except the reckoning with Haystack Rock. You walk away from it, only to return.

131.       There are some tidal considerations, to which I have alluded above. If you go at the right time, it is low tide, and you can circumnavigate the rock, or some portion, even if not right up beside it, amid the violent and romanticist thunder of the surf there. On a recent trip, we were so jet lagged (flying from the East), that everyone, meaning Laurel, Theo Moody, and myself on this occasion, got up at 5:30ish to go down to the rock, before it was yet touristy for the day, and as we worked our way across the parking lot where they usually array the farmer’s market, and there we saw a mother elk and her progeny, a brand-new baby elk (limping poignantly, heartbreakingly), working their way across the parking lot.  and from this heavily symbolic witnessing, parting from another symbol of the wildness that precedes human ubiquity, we headed to the beach, in the first light, where there we were among just a few, if any others, to find that, yes, it was extreme low tide, and we could get up very close to the rock.

132.       (I did, on an earlier trip, propose to Laurel right beside the rock.)

133.       Haystack Rock is neither coastline, nor ocean;  it inhabits some categorically unstable space, and when there is six feet of sea level rise, in the next fifty years, and the shore meets the first file of beach houses in Cannon Beach, the rock will still prevail, as it is 235 feet tall. It will be, perhaps, in the climate-crisis futurity, an island. There are a number of these in the immediate vicinity. The kinds of islands that, in the old days, slaughtered a storm-tossed sea craft, descending on Cannon Beach by night, spilling out its mariners to their watery graves, from which doomed mariners were flung.

134.       We watched the eclipse of August 21, 2017, from this very spot, right near to Haystack Rock, just a bit in from the shore, pitched some blankets, and got out all the gear. It was bright and clear.

135.       But I have failed to mention the fogs of Cannon Beach. As with other locales of the Pacific Northwest, a fog blows in from the Pacific in Cannon Beach, and it is both unpredictable and occasionally short-lived. It’s not unknown there that there is fog in the morning, so that the morning seems overcast, only to give way to crystal-clarity by lunch.

136.       It was clear that morning, but as the eclipse moved toward its drama, the temperature plunged. Went from sunny/summery to a bit cooler, and the light, in the moments preliminary to the almost-eclipse of Cannon Beach, turned unto the dusk of magic hour, to some twilight of the exquisitely memorable, the hushed and solemn slow motion of inevitability.

137.       Is the silence part of the symptomology of eclipse sickness? Is it that in the falling-into-awe, an awe of magnitude, one can only know silence, or is it that nature falls into a hushed reserve, the birds in a confusion of diurnal scaling, for which silence is their most forceful commentary? Is eclipse sickness when silence becomes the only narrative trope? I didn’t notice whether the birds all ceased, because there was the sound of the surf, which was heedless, despite the role of the moon in the eclipse, or at least imperceptibly attentive to the eclipse. And yet: it seemed quieter as the eclipse proceeded, and so which quiet? How quiet? By what reason?

138.       Q: What does it take to silence humanity? A: The blotting out of the sun.

139.       We didn’t get to the total eclipse, as noted above, but we got very close, on the beach, and then just as the shadow passed over, in its magnificent hurtling, its shadowing, it also began to retreat, like a peeling back of reverence, to reveal the quotidian beneath. The restoration of order, the humdrum of recumbent bikers and parents-with-toddlers. And the clockface gazed down on us and said: now wait a few more years. Where it seemed endless, boring, and insubstantial, in Darien, CT, in 1970, now it seemed eternal, epochal, and too short. We took to this nearest set of stairs, a long winding staircase up from the beach, and when we got to the top, underneath canopy of trees, the shadows of the leaves, we saw there, on the street leading into town, were each flecked was with a little crescent representation, the shadow of the shadow.

140.       Each and every leaf, that is, in this Impressionist rendering, was precisely umbrated, covered by the paradox of eclipsing, where the shadow covers everything, even the sun, except that the sun continues to flare out from beside the shadow, where all is process of becoming and unbecoming, being and non-being.

141.       Haystack Rock felt like some constituent element in this drama, the pebble in the interplanetary drama. A sundial for the movement of planets.

142.       The photographs that memorialize that time, many taken by the amazing photographer I get to share most family events with, my wife, are, well, kind of dark. In a very compelling way. They seemed to have that emphatic and smudgy gray of the daguerreotype.

143.       The photos represent a group of people with sunglasses on staring reverently up into the evening sky. In silence.

144.       By the time of this second eclipse, I had become a bit of an astronomically-motivated human, a watcher of the skies. I can now count multiple occurrences of the getting up in the middle of the night to see the harvest moon, or the bright occasional passing of this or that comet, the various meteor showers. Northern lights. Supermoons. I always watch the NASA footage, no matter what it is. A touching-down on Mars. As with watcher of the skies called Herman Melville, I had come, in a way, to find the allegory in all things in space, in the greater container of the all-created. The writing of human events was always written on this papyrus.

145.       In 1969, not long before the first eclipse described here, my parents’ marriage was beginning to unwind. Nine months after the eclipse, or thereabouts, they told us, one evening, that they were going to separate. I can remember a sort of slow-motion slipping out of the regular world, then, a slipping out of its routine concerns, the participation in normal human discourse at school, an unfastening away. I was partway up into the heavens.

146.       From the “storm-tossed ship” analogy about Bulkington, Melville extends the thought, immediately, to his larger theme in “The Lee Shore,” the relationship, among sailors, to their original port of call: “The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.” That is, after calling Bulkington himself a “storm-tossed ship,” Melville frames his teleological purpose in this chapter.

147.       And here, I think, is where my father (your grandfather) started to get very interested. Imagine him, as I often do, as an undergraduate in the 1950s, first really considering Moby Dick, with its frankly philosophical massiveness, and landing here. On this passage. Later, when he digested “The Lee Shore” for friends, he would often say that it was “the best piece of writing ever about the investment business,” by which I think he meant it’s about everything except business.

148.       “The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.”

149.       The port, which is home, is to be avoided in this Melvillian formulation.

150.       The port is dangerous.

151.       Everything that is “kind to our mortalities,” here, is dangerous.

152.       Forget all about the safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, or warm blankets.

153.       Forget all that stuff.

154.       “In that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.”

155.       The dialectical formulation of this chapter, then, concerns leeward versus windward, the “lee” being the coast, where the ship cannot be landed in the gale, because it can’t be maneuvered where the storm is casting it, toward the rocks and shoals, without running aground.

156.       My father taught me about literature, by the way. He didn’t teach me very much about the investment business at all. He didn’t read to us from Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose over the turkey roast every thanksgiving. Or The Little Book of Common-Sense Investing by John C. Bogle. He read “The Lee Shore.”

157.       He started reading it aloud after my parents separated. For some reason, he didn’t read it with my mother present. He read it having crashed the seacraft of domesticity on the rocks of the Long Island Sound. So: let’s assume, then, that there is something here like an anti-hearthstone argument that called to my father, that was part of his grief.

158.       According to the plan of their separation (eight or nine months after the eclipse), he, my father, was going to move out of the house near to which we were standing on the day of the eclipse, moving in with some friends in the vicinity. And then because of a further contentious legal battle between my parents, which dragged on, we didn’t see him, after he moved out, for many months.

159.       My feeling was that my father, in the time in which his marriage was failing, was sometimes inconsolable, acted out of character, felt an outsized loss about what happened to his “home,” from which he went to sleep on the couch of a college buddy, without seeing his kids.  This loss may well afflict every person who runs the gauntlet of separation and divorce, regardless of their feelings about marriage itself, but his case was especially hard.

160.       In my view, therefore, it would perhaps be erroneous to read into my father’s obsession with “The Lee Shore,” as though it were a simple resistance to the domestic. He wasn’t against home, from which he came to be disenfranchised in some crisis of isolation and uncertainty.

161.       However, it might be possible to see the passage in “The Lee Shore” as an ex post facto rationalization of the disaffiliation that he was already suffering.

162.       He became, at least in public, a person sympathetic to “The Lee Shore,” to the expressions thereof, by being pried loose from family in actuality.

163.       So: my father was often not present or was present only in some limited way on weekends, and didn’t often overstay his welcome with us kids, as he was often exhausted, had a long commute from the city, probably had job-related stress, and maybe was suffering over whatever was taking place between himself and my mother, which is unknown to me and missing from this account.

164.       By the way, in March 1970, the market was getting slaughtered.

165.       And, in all fairness, let me say that my father’s absence was matched by an equal and opposite absence on the part of my mother, who was absent not in her person but in some different but equally consequential way.

166.       Maybe both were fleeing home!

167.       Further context: not too long ago, we (meaning myself, Laurel, and Theo) went to my dad’s hometown in the state of Maine, the town where he was born, and where he lived for a couple of years, before my grandfather’s position at General Motors required that they relocate, as they then did often thereafter. (There is a famous-in-the-family story of my dad, your grandfather, hiding in a packing crate of some kind, in some town, after yet another move, to avoid starting at a new elementary school. He stayed in there quite a while. The police were summoned, my grandparents were distraught, etc. He has been kidnapped! Eventually, he was located, cowering, in the packing crate.) Anyway, we visited this town of his birth, which is in Maine, inland from the coast. We ended up staying there for a weekend, because the hotels were a lot cheaper there.

168.       We spent only a little time driving around in this town, Dad’s hometown, the name of which I am leaving out, so as to avoid offending, and here we took photographs for him, in particular taking pictures of his house, which he could still remember, as his illness was more moderate then. This town, in the present, is one of the New England towns that seems a little bit fallen on hard times. In particular, there seemed to be a sort of aimless, wandering, downtrodden pedestrian class on the main thoroughfare, which led me to hypothesize as to a general difficulty now descended on the region: the opioid crisis.

169.       This particular affliction is not unusual, rurally speaking. But it seemed to me, who had only been in my father’s hometown on one other occasion, evidence not only of decline, but of the challenges of inland Maine and its post-agricultural suburban or exurban economies.

170.       Perhaps it’s fair to say that my father’s family, despite its regional pride about Maine, wanted to get away from the rural part of the state to the coast. Getting away from the inland was to be, in the Maine style, upwardly mobile. You achieved the coast.

171.       For example, they summered in the Boothbay Harbor area for some years, which was and is more like the Vacationland edition of Maine, which my father approved of, as though the coast were something like a “real” Maine, which means a narrativized Maine, a public relations Maine, and as though further east were the even more real Maine, as though the lobster fisherman of Penobscot Bay, e.g., were the “real” Mainers, maybe even the most real. Real here being a feeling, an aspiration. Not a thing in nature, but an itch.

172.       And: once my dad’s family got to the coast, they wanted to get to Boston, and from Boston they were hell bent on New York. I’m graphing a migratory route that was in effect unstated. But there was some kind of dissatisfaction with the opportunities afforded by inland Kennebec County. There was nothing for the Moodys to do there anymore. They had done what there was to do there. There was an avarice for greater opportunity. My grandparents, your great-grandparents, wanted more for my dad, so despite their middle class means, they paid for the best schools for him, which was to say a private boarding school, and an Ivy League university (even if it was reputed to be the “the worst Ivy” in those days), and he went from there to the training program at a fancy investment bank in New York City, and then he moved to the Connecticut Suburbs, and married an heiress.

173.       I am, I mean, unavoidably, evidence of a certain kind of class mobility. The evidentiary material is not relevant to this discussion. The most salient trace of this mobility is that it was okay, even celebrated, that I became a person who talked about writing and literature, who might subsequently write an essay about the greatest of American novels, Moby Dick.

174.       My father, because of all the upward mobility, was always a little bit conflicted about his parents and their class of origin. Their inland working class origins. (My great-grandfather, as I have said elsewhere, was a stone mason. With eight kids. Who died of silicosis. In his fifties.) His determination, perhaps, made embarrassment about his parents an uninvited but persistent feeling.

175.       Maybe “embarrassment” isn’t the right word. Maybe it was an embarrassment that co-existed with pride. Maybe it was both things tugging that made him uncomfortable. Maybe it was so much indebtedness and appreciation that he didn’t know what to do except cover it over with embarrassment. His parents’ interior decorating was a locus of this struggle.

176.       Maybe it was that he wanted to spare them, his parents, embarrassment, the embarrassment of not feeling at home in the life they intended for him.

177.       I could make a list of examples for you—of finely tuned but brutish cultural distinctions, between your grandfather and his parents, the little grinding bits of misunderstanding and shearing away among the generations, but making a list of these examples of my grandmother’s decorating idiosyncrasies is just casting her as different from us when in some way I feel like she was exactly like we were, all of us with our idiosyncrasies, our socially uncomfortable tendencies, our sense of otherness that we were trying to curtain off. Though I appeared to be, I was not part of a history of stylish yacht clubs and L. L. Bean.  When we, the kids, wrestled with the generational chasm between ourselves and our Maine grandparents, it was our own feelings of difference that we failed to account for. We spared my grandmother the pain of the difference between us and the people we imagined we were to be, which was a longing that she shared with us, a longing that was purple with discomfort.  

178.       This, to me, was part of my father’s psychic predicament, in 1970, this same nagging, itching not-knowing-how-to-be, wanting more and failing more. And I have heard him, even in the maelstrom of his forgetting, now, express sympathy and worry about his parents. All that they went through. As though this is a last thing worth remembering.

179.       So: when my father invoked the wanting to flee from home, when my father read “The Lee Shore” as a sort of brief on human conduct, a lesson on turning away from home, I always hear him saying, too: “And get the hell out of rural Maine. No matter how much it hurts. Give your kids a better chance!”

180.       And yet in his later years, like his father, he was always wanting to go back to Maine.

181.       Saying that the “The Lee Shore” is about investment banking, as in this passage, e.g. “In that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through,” is really funny and is a bit provocative. But let us harken, also, to the lower layer.

182.       This big, middle paragraph of “The Lee Shore,” after the proem, the extended metaphor, the passage that explains the leeward/windward dialectical formulation, concludes thus: “With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!”

183.       If you’ll just let me address this portion: “ . . . seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again.” (Italics mine.)

184.       Until now, we haven’t quite seen, with such clarity, the idea that it is the “landlessness” that is a principal requirement of the “windward” (as opposed to the “leeward”) side. Landlessness, which is formlessness.

185.       There’s a lot to say about formlessness. Which is the direction into which Bulkington points the Pequod.

186.       And to speak to formlessness is to say something, perhaps, about the theology of Moby Dick. It’s always there bubbling up, as with the relevance of The Cloud of Unknowing to the text, “Look then busily that thy ghostly work be nowhere bodily; and then wheresoever that that thing is, on the which thou wilfully workest in thy mind in substance, surely there art thou in spirit, as verily as thy body is in that place that thou art bodily.” It is not entirely outrageous to say that a theological note gets sounded in “The Lee Shore,” in a conception of landlessness/formlessness, namely that what is safe is without particular shape, dimension, and scale, and that its fearsomeness, in part is in its being-empty-of-form.

187.       When you think about the “oceanic feeling” as a formlessness composed of ocean, its immensity is not just to be found in the fact that it extends all the way to the horizon in every direction, but also that it is both without shape and capable of being amassed, at the scale of the sublime. It is also a taxonomical formlessness that is inaugurated here. A pushing against category and categorical fixity.

188.       Melville displays a similar anxiety about the emptiness of the desert, during his visit to Egypt: ““Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?” (This I learned from Jeff Wheelwright’s great essay about Clarel, “The Skeptical Pilgrim.”)

189.       I have been reading about the Heart Sutra recently, as translated by the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh (his translation is entitled The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore), which is a magnificence, and his translation contains extended and significant discussions of formlessness:

190.       “All phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing.” In fact, Hanh’s translation goes even further: “Whoever can see this no longer needs anything to attain.”

191.       That emptiness, of the Heart Sutra, is this landlessness, this knowing and unknowing, this onrushing toward this unknowing, this shadow of a shadow that is annihilation of form. To which we go when we go away from the lee and away from the categorical stability of solid objects.

192.       Now, let’s see if we can catalogue briefly how, in Herman Melville, eclipses are, too, signs of formlessness, are an advent of the formlessness of the beyond.

193.       For example, the story, “Benito Cereno” from The Piazza Tales, written just a couple of years after Moby Dick , is among the places in the Melville canon where an eclipse is most evident. Well, maybe it’s not evident at all. Maybe it is both evident and not evident. Not everyone agrees that it is an eclipse featured there at all.

194.       A relevant passage is right at the beginning: “The sky seemed a grey mantle. Flights of troubled grey fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled grey vapours among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”

195.       And then, later: “Likewise he bade word be carried to his chief officer, that if against present expectation the ship was not brought to anchor by sunset, he need be under no concern, for as there was to be a full moon that night.” The thought is that the eclipse achieves its zenith at the climax of the story.

196.       But it’s really more of a systematic interlacing of shadows, the language of shadows, and then the allusions to the “horizontal moonlight,” a truly gorgeous formulation, which likewise slips from your grasp just as you reach for it.

197.       The images of shadow and the movement of heavenly bodies are pervasive, even ubiquitous, in “Benito Cereno,” as in Moby Dick, and this preoccupation extends to the word “eclipse” in the larger body of Melvillian work; Melville uses the word eclipse for its heavenly associations, but also as a synonym for veiling for covering over, shrouding, cloaking, blanketing, concealing, occultating, and so on.

198.       Well, and Melville does, further in “Benito Cereno,” employ the word “eclipse:” “His last equivocal demeanour recurred. He had risen to his feet, grasped his guest’s hand, motioned toward his hat; then, in an instant, all was eclipsed in sinister muteness and gloom.”

199.       This story is set, I believe in 1799, in September, and in truth there was a solar eclipse in 1799, in October, which passed over Chile, in the area where “Benito Cereno” is set, and if not in the path of totality, the story’s location was very nearly so. It, the 1799 eclipse, was one of the longest lasting of solar eclipses since they have come to be measured. In the path of totality the 1799 eclipse lasted four minutes and fifty seconds. It is a shadowing forth in the text, not a named event, which afflicts the story in part, not in whole. 

200.       (And, similarly, there was the tale of the Eclipse, a U.S. merchant vessel set upon by Malay warriors in the 1838 (when Herman Melville was 19), this attack causing a retributive sally by United States vessels on Sumatra, the second such “expedition,” after a similar one in 1832, these during Pacific explorations by the fleet of the United States in search of whatever it is that explorations are in search of—opportunities to assault the self-determination of Pacific islanders.)

201.       Eclipses are also prevalent in Melville’s Battle-Pieces, a later collection of poems, from the period in which his career, his literary influence was in some eclipse.  There in the poem about Antietam: “Through storm-cloud and eclipse must move/Each Cause and Man, dear to the stars and Jove.”

202.       It’s in the prose, too. In Mardi, severally, for example, in a section wherein a character delivers, aloud, a last will and testament: “Item. My esteemed neighbour Lakreemo having since the last lunar eclipse; called daily to inquire after the state of my health: and having nightly made tearful inquiries of my herb doctor . . . I do hereby give and bequeath all and sundry those vegetable pills, potions, powders . . . in the west-by-north corner of my east-by-southeast crypt.” (Mardi is Melville’s greatest repository of eclipses, with seven.)

203.       Melville also uses the word eclipse in Redburn and White-Jacket, and in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.

204.       In Israel Potter, chapter 15, there’s this passage, very like unto the shadowing in “Benito Cereno,” “While thus engaged, suddenly a shadow, like that thrown by an eclipse, was seen rapidly gaining along the deck, with a sharp defined line, plain as a seam on the planks. It involved all before it.”

205.       I admire this last sentence so much. The implications are noteworthy. It involved all before it. Causes you to wonder which kind of “all,” and which kind of “before,” and which kind of “it,” and, naturally, what it means to be “involved,” wherein a shadow, a thing of no mass, nor, at least, not of a mass that is perceptible to us here, a thing that is a formlessness, nonetheless affects, hefts, by virtue of its presence among people, in a story, in an environment, in a place, in a world, in a superstructure. As with the shadow of an heavenly eclipse, which shadows forth from the most enormous of things, the masses of heavenly bodies, as when a shadow passes across the consciousness and memory of a loved one.

206.       Actually, Clarel, Melville’s late epic poem, which I am only now reading for the first time now also has a great number of references to eclipses, refers to “death’s eclipse,” and also in cogitating a bit on Jesus’s last words on the cross, alludes to the “eclipse that cry of cries brought down,” giving us a very transparent context for how Melville thought about the word, because Clarel, perhaps more transparently than in any prior composition by the author, shadows forth Melville’s agonized relationship with religion in its doctrinal and narrative aspects, the knowing and unknowing aspect of the Christian story, the possibility that there is a spirituality which precedes Christian doctrine, and so on, through which spirituality may be revealed that is other than the Episcopalian or Dutch Reformed or Unitarian dogma consonant with Melville’s experience, a spirituality that is a flickering, a substantial insubsantiality.

207.       The collected works of Herman Melville that I searched through, contains one use of “eclipsing,” and twenty-nine uses of “eclipse” in its various forms in the canon of Melville as a whole. Making it a major image in the body of the work. Sort of in the way “forgetting,” e.g., is a word in Thomas Pynchon’s work (see, e.g., his essay in Slow Learner).

208.       As I have said, in the “Quarter-Deck” chapter of Moby Dick, there isn’t an eclipse, not in the literal sense, not in a way of certainties, but there is way of uncertainties, of shadowing.

209.       Well, really what is an eclipse? Is the eclipse a revealing, rather than a shadowing, in which the mask covering over tells us more of what is beneath? Does it tell us about the shadow, or what is behind the shadow? When Ahab says that underneath “the mask” is the thing he chiefly hates (“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him”), that inscrutable thing, can we know what it is that he is referring to? Or is there just no name for it? Is it a namelessness?

210.       Is the eclipse, in Melville, a recognition of the collapsed opposites, the singularity of imagination, which can’t be swallowed up in one definition, or: is the eclipse more like death, as it seems to be in some of the quotations where he employs the word. Is the eclipse an annihilation, an obliteration of the self, or is it an inscription behind an annihilation, a writing or an effacement of writing, an unmasking, and a reading of the veil?

211.       It was in the midst of typing out all of this eclipsing, in a kind of compulsion, I at last betook myself online to rewatch some of the 1956 movie version of Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck.

212.       Have you ever seen this?

213.       It was directed by John Huston, a very fine director, who made during his lifetime some other films I particularly favor, like The Dead, based on a story by James Joyce. He adapted other very excellent literary properties, like Wise Blood and Under the Volcano. Huston’s film of Moby Dick starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. A pretty face. A famously non-emotive actor who got a lot of mileage out of his serious mien and stentorian voice, which are the standard for masculinity during the Organization Man epoch of American culture. As in, e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird. Huston apparently talked Gregory Peck into the role of Captain Ahab, and then they fell out afterward, owing to Peck’s feeling that he had done a poor job with the role.

214.       The script for Huston’s film of Moby Dick was written by Ray Bradbury, a writer of golden-age science fiction, whose Farenheit 451 made a very strong film under the helm of Francois Truffaut, and who wrote a book that had some impact on my own development, The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury admitted to Huston that though he had tried he had never finished Moby Dick.

215.       Nevertheless, the language in Melville’s book is so immense, in the dramatic, theatrical way, that the film sort of can’t go wrong, not really, as indeed the scene of Ahab explaining the search for Moby Dick to Starbuck makes clear. See here:

216.       The language of Melville does a thing that language at its most profound can do, as maybe no other form can do, and that’s why even your grandfather reading aloud “The Lee Shore” is enough to move us, again and again. Year after year. No matter when read, no matter what the condition of the reader. No matter what is going on in the world. No matter how acute is the forgetting, if that forgetting is already taking place. That voice and that sequence of words.

217.       So it is in the film.

218.       That said, your grandfather disliked the film of Moby Dick, which would have been released when he was in his junior year of college, mid-way through his course of study in American literature. (Almost seventy years ago.) Did he already love the book then, in junior year? Perhaps.

219.       Did he see the film immediately upon release, or in his senior year, when he was near to his graduation, having also taken a shine to Hemingway, especially, and Fitzgerald, and The Catcher in the Rye, and, somewhat improbably, On the Road?

220.       I don’t know exactly when he saw the film of Moby Dick, but he didn’t like the film. And he had an oft-repeated critical perception that he would employ when speaking to the failure of the movie: “They made Ahab seem mad. Ahab wasn’t mad.”

221.       A profitable approach to understanding Ahab’s agony is perhaps to be found in conceiving of it as theological or religious agony, as noted above. And this coheres, e.g., with what Nathaniel Hawthorne said about Melville, in celebrated journal entry, after seeing him in 1856 (one year before the death of Melville’s son), in a frequently quoted passage about his friend:

222.       “It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

223.       This essay, the one I’m writing, which is mostly about my father, is against any rigid identification of Ahab with Melville himself. This essay doesn’t believe that Ahab is some cryptical version of Melville. Nor does this essay believe your grandfather is Ahab, nor is he Melville. (He’s just a reader of Moby Dick.) And this essay does not care, in a way, how Melville conducted himself personally. This essay does not care about any Freudian reading of Melville and the whale. Nor does the essay care, not exactly, if Melville carnally loved Hawthorne during the time of the composition of Moby Dick, though the idea is welcome. Nor does this essay linger over the suicide or accidental death by pistol mishap of Melville’s son, nor about the unhappiness of his sons generally. Nor do I know with any certainty about Melville’s own depression, which seems to shine forth episodically, at least to me, maybe because of my own struggles there. Nor his drinking. This essay does not require any particular biographical material in order to ponder on “The Lee Shore.”

224.       In this way, I am speaking to the work exactly the way your grandfather would have learned about the work, for the simple reason that your grandfather read the book first during the period of the so-called New Criticism, that literary critical rubric that somewhat dominated literary studies in the 1950s. Your grandfather read like he was from the New Criticism, even if he didn’t know or remember that that was what it was called.

225.       So when he, your grandfather, said that Ahab was not “mad,” in this way criticizing Gregory Peck’s performance (and John Huston’s direction), he was preferring to be on the page, with what was on the page, and what was on the page, particularly during the “Quarter-Deck” chapter, is a character who, like the author, “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

226.       Not “mad,” but afflicted.

227.       The word that keeps coming up in this regard, when we talk about Ahab’s wrestling with philosophy, is the “absolute,” which does, as some people say, sound Faustian, like there is just the one thing to know, and Ahab wants to know the one thing, the truth of truths, and Moby Dick, the whale, stands for the one thing, or is an emblem, and Ahab seems to feel like dispatching the Moby Dick, the whale who gnawed off his leg, will enable him to feel at peace with this “absolute.”

228.       There’s a word in the earliest philosophy, the Greek pre-Socratic philosophy, for when you think it’s all about one thing, and that word is monism. Some of the pre-Socratics felt like all the things in the universe, in the world, came from one substance. What exactly this substance was amounted to a lively debate, but a host of Pre-Socratics, including Anaximander, reputed to be the author of the “first” ever written fragment from Greek philosophy, felt that the first thing, the primal element, was fire.

229.       When, it seems, Ahab says that he intends to strike at what’s “behind the mask,” at the unreasoning thing that sends the universe on its rounds, he sounds like a monist, like there is an origin of origins in “one thing.”

230.       We might be forgiven, though, for thinking that maybe the origin of things, in the world of Ahab, is in the water, rather than in flames. Moby Dick is a resident of the oceans, the story takes place on the high seas, Ishmael’s discussion, at the beginning of the book, is about the intense need of human’s to be near, or upon, the seas.

231.       Such a feeling, an “oceanic feeling,” is very like the formulation that Freud borrowed from Romain Rollande, to describe, well, spiritual awe.

232.       Maybe Ahab has the oceanic feeling, then. He’s not mad, and even though he’s not seeing God, not exactly, in the whale, he’s feeling the feeling that the word for the divine is perhaps arrayed to cause in us, the feeling of the sublime. Moby Dick is what a god looks like in the sea, implacable, just, beautiful, unpredictable, episodic, merciless, capricious, unknowable, whole.

233.       And an eclipse is what God looks like in the solar system, with the shadows of the heavenly bodies falling across the face of emptiness.

234.       The drive toward the hearthstone, toward the consolations of home, toward human community, and all that these represent, as described in “The Lee Shore,” is the drive away from the oceanic feeling, away from the sublime, away from the raw consideration of scale that is both how the ocean-going man gazes at the ocean and how the contemporary man gazes upon the eclipse. The anti-hearthstone argument of “The Lee Shore” is meant to drive us toward the ocean and the scale of the ocean, away from the coastal settlements, into a meditation on the scale of the sea, in which is reflected the scale of all the heavenly bodies.

235.       The film of Moby Dick may be imperfect, but then again, every now and then it is utterly compelling, in that when he least expects it, Gregory Peck, in using the language, suggests all that inhabits the lower layer, all the immensities, and one watches almost without being able to breathe, for the slow and patient way the horror mounts up. “The white whale tasks me. He heaps me. But he is but a mask. It is the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate.”

236.       The camera dollies in.

237.       Your grandfather didn’t like the film, but that shouldn’t stop us from looking there. For the language.

238.       There are only the two short paragraphs remaining of “The Lee Shore” that I have so far failed to reckon with, after the section that declares for the open sea, and they attempt to describe, in an oblique way, Bulkington’s ultimate fate.

239.       For example: “Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”

240.       Melville seems to me to refer to the “now,” the eternal now, of the having departed, the having already died. The now inhabited henceforth by the Bulkington who is narrated from after the fact. That is, “Know ye now in death, Bulkington?”

241.       Formlessness not understood until the advent of non-being.

242.       Is the presumption that Bulkington can still ponder these deep questions posed by Ishmael, even from his watery grave?

243.       That would make this a metaphysical passage.

244.       Maybe the thing about Moby Dick is that it’s all metaphysical, or that everything that seems granular, realistic, of which there is a fair amount, is a “pasteboard mask,” behind which is the metaphysical. The occasional moments when we can see beneath the everyday activities on board the Pequod are when we can see its “real” material. The hemp of its braid.

245.       As this paragraph I’m speaking of goes on this metaphysical aspect is even more plain: “Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth . . .” (Italics mine.)

246.       I mean, I am interested in “seem to see.” Is the seeing a mere seeming to see because all seeing (that is, all understanding) is approximation, not “actual” seeing, or does Bulkington simply “seem” to do so because he is post-mortal?

247.       And then there is the question of a “mortally intolerable truth.” I think you could prune a modifier here and there in Moby Dick and it would only make the passages stronger.

248.       That said: what does “mortally intolerable truth” mean exactly? If it means “intolerable to mortals,” such that the passage implies “Glimpses do you seem to see of that truth intolerable to mortals,” do you really need “mortally” in this passage? Could it not be “Glimpses do you seem to see of that intolerable truth?”

249.       Because who is seeing or seeming to see but the mortals? And if it is only the mortals, then why name them? They are implied! Unless, “mortally” means living beings, particularly, as opposed to the perceptions of the dead.

250.       Glimpses do you seem to see, though you are unseeing, of the truths intolerable to living beings.

251.       And then: a semicolon that these days would probably be a colon.

252.       And then: “that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea . . .”

253.       I think I should tell you this somewhat infamous story about your grandfather, that one day, in the Boothbay Harbor area of Maine, a coastal Maine, your father got into a skiff, a little rowboat with a tiny engine on it (I’m reconstructing, but this is my somewhat informed guess), and headed out for some island or other, out there in the harbor, in heavy fog. Without telling anyone what he was doing.  

254.       I spent a while, yesterday, thinking about which island, exactly, would have been the island he was intended upon, if it really was an island (and later he lived on an island full time, so you know he loved an island). There are many possible island destinations in the Boothbay Harbor area. McFarland Island, Clam Rock, e.g., the two little unnamed islands off the yacht club there, Tumbler Island, Mouse Island, Capitol Island, Burnt Island, Pig Island, Squirrel Island, Ram Island, Inner White, Damariscove, and so on. It sort of depends on where he was pushing off from, exactly, in his little skiff, alone, in heavy fog. Some of these would have been too far, or way too far, depending on his point of origin, like several miles out.

255.       After Damariscove, furthest beyond the mouth of the harbor, your next destination, heading south, or east, would be, well, the edge the Georges Banks, at a distance of circa 62 miles, or, if heading further east, Nova Scotia. The open sea. Then there’s Europe, too. If you missed any nearer port of call.

256.       Your grandfather, in my recollection, told this story as a stupid thing he did once, and the presumption is that he found the island he was heading for. He had no navigational instruments of any kind. Maybe he had a compass, but I doubt it. I never knew him to have a compass for any purpose whatever. And during the time he had a boat, he always navigated by sight, and never went any further from the shore than was possible navigating by sight. He knew where he was and where he was going.

257.       Probably the lunacy of his adventure in Boothbay Harbor bears on his later understanding of this passage, “The Lee Shore,” on his fondness for this passage, that he did this stupid kid thing, for no particular reason. He almost went out to sea. Alone.

258.       The Boothbay story, serves as a welcome backdrop for this passage: “ . . . all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea . . .”

259.       This is a pretty straightforward bit of prose until “the open independence of her sea.”

260.       We know from the paragraphs above that the open sea is “windward,” is anti-hearthstone, but “open independence” is curious and new in this paragraph. Suddenly, there is a whiff of old-fashioned dark-romanticist thinking about the “windward.” It’s not just that it is safer than being dashed on the rocks of home. Now the windward is where “independence” is. And in the rest of the sentence, it appears that all “heaven and earth” oppose this “open independence,” as shown here: “while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”

261.       Meaning, perhaps, that heaven and earth want to squelch the “deep and earnest thinking” and the “open independence,” by sending you, poor Bulkington, back toward the dreaded domestic space.

262.       Some of the implication here, to me, is as in all those male-dominated formulations about the wild, suffering, immensity of art-making, of writing, of beauty and truth, which gave rise, e.g., to this counterproductive notion that artists can’t have families, that families get in the way of making great art.

263.       This is all bunk, this way of thinking, which is part of why I have written this essay for you, whom I love, you who have made my work so much better, you who are nothing if not representatives of the hearthstone.

264.       In truth, as I think the whole point of “The Lee Shore” is structuralist, and dialectical, Hegelian, in which there is superstructure that has windward vs. leeward as its most transparent metaphor. I don’t think Melville is really saying that we should all take a skiff out past Damariscove (the hourglass-shaped island!) heading for Portugal. However, I think the additional point is that we are all somewhere between, leeward and windward, and that our assumptions are often reversed, thinking the wrong way around about what is safe and what is terrifyingly free.

265.       And: probably you remember a bit about the last paragraph of “The Lee Shore,” because this past summer when we were visiting with your grandfather, we talked about this passage some, and, incredibly, he, your grandfather, who could not really remember having had lunch just a few minutes after it was served, was still, then, able to recite the last sentence of this paragraph, which is the last sentence of the chapter:

266.       “But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-Perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”

267.       Some, perhaps most, of this paragraph is a restatement of ideas that are already sketched out in the big second paragraph of the chapter (“the port would fain give succor,” etc.), which we have noted above.

268.       The first sentence makes a pretty bold claim. First, in saying “in landlessness alone resides highest truth” it repeats its theme, but by adding “shoreless, indefinite as God” we get a direct rendering of Melville’s theological arc, his monism, his Taoism, his idea of what God looks like, the God of no forms and not-knowing. Arguably, this is a pretty transparent rendering of the “oceanic feeling” mentioned some pages back.  But then the first sentence of this paragraph goes further, and makes a recommendation, or, perhaps, an interpretation, that doubles as a recommendation of Bulkington’s watery fate. My translation is: “Better to die in landlessness, as it’s closer to God, than to be forced into the inglorious servitude of the domestic hearth.”

269.       I can really hear my father saying the words of this paragraph, you know. Though it is perhaps a father of mine from an earlier time. A father of whom I acknowledge that he was in flux, when he began reading this passage. Every time I type out these final words of “The Lee Shore” I hear him. Reading this passage after the failure of his first marriage, and thus, in his suffering, this “open independence” of the sea, pressing him onward. I too went through divorce, and I can readily understand this interpretation, the perhaps reductive interpretation, which finds Melville in complex relationship to the domestic. But to reduce “The Lee Shore” is to miss out on some or most of what the post-dialectical Melville intends.

270.       The sentences that follow are to me a bit of showing off. They are just eulogistic, hortatory, but they tell us nothing new, really: “For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?”

271.       The answer to this rhetorical question is, by the way, it’s vain, if by “vain” you mean a thing of vanity. This sentence to me is prose of the elegant and moving kind, but without any further elucidation of ideas, although I surely do like the “worm-like” assertion. Does it mean “serpentine,” “tortuous,” “nematode-ish?”

272.       Then the very end of the chapter brings us back to where we started, to Bulkington himself: “Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”

273.       Which says, elegiacally, you did not die in vain, oh Bulkington.

274.       You died on the windward side, in the open independence of your sea.

275.       When I first heard this passage, as is no doubt the case for you, too, it represented my first prolonged encounter with the term “apotheosis.”

276.       What a great word! What a beginning of the wrestling with all that the ancient Greeks, in particular, wish to tell us, still tell us, in the red-shifting of their legacy as it is passed on into the post-classical present.

277.       “App” from the Greek, means “of” or “from,” and “theos” you will remember, as it supplies the name for one of the two of you. The relevant early Greek word that combines these two is “apotheoun.” Which means “make a god of.” That became “apotheosis,” in Greek, which then migrated to Latin, where it was employed to describe the multitude of god-making in pantheistic civilizations. This in turn became the somewhat deracinated contemporary definition: “a culmination or climax.”

278.       Ishmael already calls Bulkington a “demigod,” of course, a lesser god, a half-god, a god in the process of becoming, who is activated, culminating, in this ocean spray, and in the “earnest” consideration of the open sea. It’s apparently what he was earnestly considering all the way back in the Spouter Inn chapter, in his melancholy, and it is through this consideration that his achieves his most perfect being. Now, in the being-narrated.

279.       It’s a big ending to “The Lee Shore.” No wonder your grandfather can still recall it so well. The language is musical, as if from some operatic aria. Of the sea, of the oceanic feeling, of the open independence.

280.       Of course, this big ending does not tell us what became of Bulkington, and my earliest reckoning of the passage involved some confusion about this fact. The chapter does not tell us where he fell off the boat, nor how, nor in what aggrieved spiritual condition. But we know that his was an “ocean-perishing.”

281.       I assume that many people have carefully argued positions on Bulkington’s demise, and I have looked up some, but I have found only one published work wherein there is an attempt to be very topographical about Bulkington’s fate, and that is in a fascinating if odd and wooly essay about celestial stuff in Moby Dick by a scholar formerly at Arizona State called Daniel Matlaga. The essay is entitled “A Journey of Celestial Lights: The Sky as Allegory in Melville’s Moby Dick.” It was published in a journal of astrology and astronomy (!).

282.       There’s a lot in Matlaga’s essay about how individual episodes in Moby Dick occur against a backdrop of very specific heavenly events, including solar eclipses, especially the episodes in which the Pequod encounters other ships. There are fascinating graphs and charts about the condition of the stars, these featuring an almost Dantesque comprehensiveness about the ways the episodes in Moby Dick and the stars align.

283.       Eventually, Matlaga’s language, I am happy to observe, blossoms well beyond what we might consider the strictly academic, especially as it details further heavenly correspondences. It gives way to an enumerated consideration of astronomy, the divine space, and insanity in Moby Dick, which I have not quite felt was a category into which any character in Moby Dick really falls. And yet Matlaga’s Jungian devotion to a nexus of collectivity and mental illness is to be admired! It perhaps includes his own endeavor! His enumerated list includes:

284.       “Bulkington’s celestial counterpoint in the sky is Ursa Minor, which contains the North Star. Bulkington disappears as the North Star does when the Pequod crosses the equator heading south. When the Pequod approaches the South China Sea it crosses the Equator heading north. It is then that Pip replaces Bulkington.”

285.       (Pip being the cabin boy, beloved of Ahab, you recall, who goes overboard.)

286.       This is risky, this passage, in a way that interests me a lot, and Matlaga finishes with further superlatives concerning Gilbert Wilson’s paintings for an illustrated edition of Moby Dick:

287.       “Six sequential ‘insanity series’ portrait panels of Ahab were painted by Gilbert Wilson in the 1950s. In the first panel, the nearly sixty-year-old Ahab is depicted as a sea captain of that period. By panel number six, Ahab’s eye has morphed into an eclipse, another eye into the moon and an ear into a galaxy. Where is panel number seven? It is not in an art gallery; it is beyond the painter’s brush. It cannot be found in a book because it transcends the author’s pen. An astronomical instrument cannot survey it. For those descendants of Bulkington, such as is Herman Melville and Pip, who dance on the frame of panel number seven, that is what Moby Dick is, that is what Melville meant.”

288.       Of course, I don’t know what Melville meant, not really; I only know about the proliferation of meanings in Melville. I know what he means to me, and I can feel what he might have meant to your grandfather, whose love for Moby Dick was a manifestation of his paternal care. Still, I like the presence/absence of this seventh panel described by Matlaga, which feels like one of those bits of arcana in an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, some long bygone work of art or scholarship wherein you can’t tell, for sure, if it’s made up or not, if it’s a dream, a surfeiting, a revelation, a journey, an apotheosis.

289.       Matlaga conjoins Bulkington, insanity, eclipses, and Moby Dick, the whale, into one paragraph, which I am trying to do to, the conjoin them all in this essay.

290.       Oh, and that reminds me that I have not described the third solar eclipse, which was on April 8, 2024.

291.       You will remember this eclipse, as you were there (well, Hazel, you were in New York State). This is a record, to be added to later by you, my co-authors, with your own experiences of any further solar eclipse.

292.       I should say that my obsession with 100% totality, as regards solar eclipses, so far unrealized in any of my solar eclipse experiences, is unwarranted, is obsessive, is perhaps Melvillian. I mean, there’s going to be an eclipse next August, and its line of totality will pass across Iceland, and I very much want to go, so that I can finally accomplish this thing: the perfect, unambiguous blotting out of the sun.

293.       We could easily, on April 8th, 2024, have stayed in Boston, which was having 93% totality. This would have been reasonable, especially when the traffic predictions (two million people on the highways of New England!) described apocalypses of traffic. But I didn’t want to stay in Boston.

294.       Both of you had school that day, and one of you had a half-day, in Columbia County, and the other one, the younger one, was precipitously ill with a stomach problem that made it impossible, especially given contemporary anxieties about viral agents, to attend school, alas, though this stomach ailment was no obstacle to riding in the car.

295.       And so we arose early and got on I-93, and headed north.

296.       With no detailed plan.

297.       For a while we intended to go to Burlington, VT, though there were heinous predictions about the roads in and around Burlington. I think everyone wanted to go to Burlington because in this way they could get food after the eclipse was over. To get there via our route, at some point, you had to jog over from I-93, into VT. And then some. I-93 gets you to St. Johnsbury, but no further. However: before I-93 gets to St. Johnsbury, you go through some luminous, ominous, depopulated mountain country.

298.       Well, we needed to transit across most of southern New Hampshire, too, where I went to high school. And for a brief moment we stopped in Concord, NH, exactly where I went to high school, we stopped at a shall-go-nameless fast-food victualizer, and there we got a kid’s meal, one of those ones that has a toy associated therewith, in this case a small plush, or pseudo-plush, animal, viz., a tiger, so flat in its appearance as to appear like a roadside casualty, which you instantly named “Eclipsy.”

299.       Then we paused briefly to gaze upon the preposterously curvilinear Merrimack River, the one that Thoreau paddled down, which winds through Concord as though serpentine or worm-like. North. The second you get out of Concord, going north, you begin to participate in nature, the part of it that is a continuous unfolding, the nature that doesn’t require the humans. The further north, the better it gets.

300.       We were in for 2 1/2 or closing on three hours of transit time, when we hit the southernmost edge of the White Mountain National Forest.

301.       Many are the hours I spent, in my childhood, walking up and down these mountains. Some of the best times of my life, in retrospect, hiking in the White Mountains. They are nothing, in truth, mere hills, when compared to the western United States. But these mountains are old. And to walk them in silence and to respect their oldness, is to feel some not-to-be-spoken force manifest. I climbed Moosilauke, just to the west of I-93, which has the steepest bit on the whole Appalachian Trail. I climbed Kinsman, I climbed Cube, and Lafayette. But I have not been back to the White Mountains often since.

302.       We were racing into that part of the world with one eye on the clock, because the clock the eclipse are conjoined, and because we knew, owing to the ability of Google maps to speak, with its red and yellow congestion illuminations, that, eventually, we were going to hit the “eclipse traffic.”

303.       See, if you weren’t careful, you would have to watch the eclipse from your car.  Exits up there are infrequent. The NH state police had crafted an injunction: no pulling over onto the shoulder to watch the eclipse.

304.       Ever nearer drew the hour, appointed by the heavens, and with it the automobile traffic. We got off the highway, exiting onto some county road, and kept going north, until, in or near to Lincoln, NH, the traffic on the road abruptly stopped. That is, in the middle of nowhere, in mountainous northern New Hampshire, between the RV hookups and the ice cream joints that weren’t open in April, there was a monstrous traffic jam. Like Seattle during rush hour, like Canal Street heading toward the Holland Tunnel.

305.       And now the ingathering of the silence again. The silence of eclipse-related awe. The awe at the scale. “It involved all before it,” as Melville says of the action of the shadow.

306.       Here’s what we did. We turned the car around, rather than stay on county Route 3, bumper to bumper.

307.       Laurel, your mother, typed “graveyard nearby” into the hand Google product, and there was one, a graveyard, right off the road, to which we drove, and which had the appropriate sight lines, into the heavens. And this is how we spent a couple of hours in the boneyard, during the eclipse.

308.       Yes, there is in this moment a recognition of the eclipse exceeding the available descriptive capabilities. It’s just a shadow, though it exceeds all the shadows, though it is a shadow from the great nothingness beyond. When you slip the cheap UV-filtering spectacles onto your face, nearing the brief, immense interval of the totality, all of this world flattens in the pasteboard, and you feel that sense of the spherical qualities of the heavenly bodies out there, their scale, their explicability and their inexplicability. You feel your inexplicable being-here on this little oblate spheroid of topsoil.

309.       Did I say the light was blue, that the whole thing was blue, that day, as if painted by Picasso during his blue time?

310.       Now, it came to pass that I got out of the parked car, because the waiting was longish, and we had already been in the car for a while (this before we alighted under a tree), and I was possessed of a restlessness, a bit of a need for wandering, as I am in this essay also possessed by this need, and I asked the others of you if I could walk around for a minute, and then I got out of the car, and I started out among the headstones. And it’s not that I can now say exactly what I was after, but I went to the far edge of the graveyard—I would say the whole area was no more than six acres in total—and then I went beyond, over a fence, and into the woods, into some vestige of the old forest that was in the process of being cut back, perhaps for the expansion of the cemetery (there are always more dead persons). I had been through all the layers, the 19^th century headstones, a smattering of even earlier ones, the world war headstones, and the recent ones, with their plastic bits of patriotism and floral simulation, and then I ventured into the taiga or boreal forest of the northeastern United States. In the coming of the blue light. To know about that forest again.

311.       It was when I heard your mother frantically calling out my name to the headstones that I realized I had sort of been gone too long, and that no one really knew where I was, in the middle of the nowhere of the White Mountains, in a place of awe, and I didn’t really think about anyone then, except I thought about the forest, and the eclipse. I just sort of kept walking. Away from hearth and home. Your mother was worried that I: had fallen into that ravine there, or had suffered a heart attack, or had been pursued by a bear.

312.       There are related worries for me, about my father, your grandfather, that he will wader off, or has already wandered off, or won’t know where he is, or won’t be able to get back, or that the eclipse of his condition has already too much had its way with him, or that the shadow has passed across him, and that the father I remember, who read aloud from Melville, now exists mostly in memory.

313.        We got to 99.9% totality in Woodstock, or Lincoln, NH, in the graveyard there, until the sun, for those four minutes, was the tiniest sliver of a thing, a little red gash in the infinite. A tear in the hem of the infinite, an accounting of all this is in the solar system, and an indication that there is a periodicity to the light of the sun, going all the way back to the beginning, to its formation. We sat under the tree.

314.       Every minute of it was precious.

315.       It should be pretty obvious, by now, why Herman Melville liked eclipses so much, if, as it is said, Melville was concerned with the “absolute.” If this ultimate inquiry into what is is what he was most concerned with, like Ahab in the “Quarter Deck” chapter, then the eclipse is the perfect figuration. You can see why the birds get quiet, why headstones are everywhere around you, and why, at the same time, there is a feeling of the momentousness of creation, the coming into being. The two contrary motions conjoined, the ending of something and the beginning.

316.       Too, Melville often seems to be talking about the United States of America, about his nation, and most especially this is the case as the country, in Melville’s day, tumbled downhill toward the Civil War. You can feel it in “Benito Cereno,” that Melville’s changing feelings about abolition are in the backdrop of the mutiny by enslaved persons in that story. You can feel it in his poems about the Civil War, the lamentation of these poems. You can feel it in Clarel, his late poem, which, as Herschel Parker points out, was a work published on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the United States.

317.       In this regard there is a sort of ur-text of American writing that has to do with eclipses, and this is Nat Turner’s description of seeing an eclipse in 1831, this as a sign of the necessity of commencing his rebellion in Southampton. Here is the relevant passage from the Confessions of Nat Turner:  

318.       “And about this time I had a vision–and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it.’ I now withdrew myself as much as my situation would permit, from the intercourse of my fellow servants, for the avowed purpose of serving the Spirit more fully—and it appeared to me, and reminded me of the things it had already shown me, and that it would then reveal to me the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of tides, and changes of the seasons.”

319.       Melville would have been twelve the year of the Southampton Rebellion of Nat Turner, having just moved to Albany, where his father, whose financial situation was very bad, was trying unsuccessfully to get into the fur business. This resulted, by the end of the year, in his father’s nervous collapse and subsequent death.

320.       The year 1831, therefore, included the solar eclipse, on February 12, which would have been partially visible in the northeast, and Turner’s rebellion, on August 21, and Melville’s father’s mental and physical collapse and death between the end of December and early January 1832.

321.       What a momentous year.

322.       Turner saw the celestial events as signs to be read, and, perhaps more accurately, as signs of transition. And Melville seems to have used the eclipse, or the word eclipse, in a very similar way. He worked the eclipse into almost every work wrote, and always with something like the Turnerish idea about the eclipse, that the eclipse is transitional, and that it signifies the workings of the “absolute.”

323.       After we went to the White Mountains, to watch the April 8, 2024, eclipse, Laurel reports that she couldn’t sleep, and I too was agitated, and this caused us to learn about the etiology of the eclipse sickness. Naturally, the empiricists, the mercantilists, the traders in facts and figures, don’t believe in eclipse sickness at all, the idea that you would have outsized dreams and a general feeling of fatigue after witnessing the enormity and relatedness of the heavenly bodies.

324.       And certainly we could have been fatigued from driving seven hours in one day, getting up early to do so, pulling out kid out of school, sitting in a graveyard for three hours, watching as the sun is effaced, etc. On days like that I always see the yellow double lines of the country roads before sleep.

325.       And yet:

326.       Maybe there is something to the idea that the transitions of life occasion an abiding sickness.

327.       Melville’s preeminent biographer spends a lot of time chastising Melville’s dad for spending money he didn’t have (referring to him as a “cannibal” of his children’s futures), and there is the shapely, narrative-oriented suspicion that his father’s nervous collapse was exacerbated by the stress of financial failure. And then there is the fact that Melville’s father walked across a frozen Hudson River in subzero temperatures in December 1831, and thereafter came down with flu-like symptoms that might have been exposure or hypothermia. We don’t know why he died, not exactly, but we know what it was for the bookish twelve-year-old son. A major transition, a devastation.

328.       There were probably only two more total eclipses in Melville’s lifetime, 1869 and 1878, during which period he was Melville the poet.

329.       Your grandfather, my dad, started reading “The Lee Shore” aloud at family dinners, as I said, after his marriage (to my mom) failed, and during one of his periods of great change. Once he started reading it aloud, he never stopped for long, and even in years we didn’t read it aloud, we discussed it fondly, as we are doing here. Your grandfather was, in those earlier times, funny, impatient, driven, unpredictable, sentimental, anti-sentimental, smart, loyal, adaptive, kind, generous, thoughtful, curious, sometimes taciturn, harsh, judgmental, open-minded, loving.

330.       He would read “The Lee Shore” to you now, if he could.

Postscriptus:

Here’s the complete text of “The Lee Shore:”

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

by Garth Greenwell

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 299 pp., $28.00

Garth Greenwell’s first book, What Belongs to You, succeeded even if his weaknesses were in plain sight. His sense of language so effectively captured abjection and sexual obsession that you didn’t mind whatever else was wrong with it. Greenwell seldom changes register, and he can no more imagine his way into another person's life than the author of your car manual. Yet he’s a born writer, a master at transposing his consciousness onto the page. I understood people’s initial reservations about him: too ornate, a knack for perfectly unsexy sex scenes, a nonexistent sense of humor. But I understood even better the across-the-board raves the book received. Here was something from another time, a Serious Novel you’d actually want to read, a swelling narrative voice whose subject was the nature of passion. I wish What Belongs to You were coming out now. A soaring exercise in style transcending corporate literary accolade magnets, distinct from the nauseating, irony-saturated gameplaying of downtown New York — has there been anything like it since?

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His second novel, Cleanness, was respectfully received by reviewers, if more reservedly than the triumphant debut. Actually, depending on whom you ask, it might not be a novel—it might be a story collection, or if you consult Greenwell himself, it might be a “lieder cycle.” While all this gaseous talk of form suggests everything irritating about Greenwell, Cleanness was structurally spry—clean indeed. The chapters stood alone, yet drew life from each other, rescuing the careful prose from feeling overdetermined. But for all that structural sophistication, too many fundamentals went out the window. Both Greenwell’s first two books chronicle relationships with other men. Mitko, the Bulgarian hustler muse of the debut, was the perfect vacuum for the greedy Greenwell treatment. Merely by reading it, you feel like you're the author, methodically, ruthlessly actualizing a sexual fantasy. What Belongs To You worked because it seduced us—never mind that it wasn't actually very sexy. "R," the boyfriend in Cleanness, was on the other hand as captivating as his dreary moniker suggests, an anemic presence strangled by prehensile prose. Beginning in Cleanness, now, too, in his latest, Small Rain, Greenwell’s characters do not get names, just a soggy letter in the alphabet soup of self-consciousness. Quotation marks are dispensed with, soldiering the words of others into conformity with the narration's catatonic drone. Conventional dialogue, like names, risks giving those outside the author's head too long a leash. Since Cleanness, Greenwell runs his imagination like an internment camp, one where the warden's pensive inner monologue must never be disturbed.

Small Rain, the follow-up to Cleanness, isn’t merely bad:

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My First Book

by Honor Levy

Penguin, 212 pp., $27.00

Earth Angel

by Madeline Cash

CLASH Books, 152 pp., $14.20

In May, Brock Colyar’s profile of Honor Levy appeared in The Cut to advertise her debut collection, My First Book. The ever-fractious online world that is both Levy’s literary subject and her fictional setting predictably reacted with resentment, disdain, and dismissal. Here, they said, was another privileged “literary it girl” pumped by publishers and publicists into the discourse, probably without the talent to back up the hype, if circulating excerpts of her extremely-online fiction, written in a flurry of dated meme-speak, were anything to go by:

It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his. 

Colyar’s article—and a subsequent spate of profiles and interviews in Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Bustle, Hobart, and more—portray a 26-year-old author poised from her college days to speak as the voice of her generation: a Bennington College wunderkind in the lineage of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, the last discovery made by the late editor Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books fame, a one-time provocation-spouting and podcasting fixture of New York’s reactionary Dimes Square scene. This hyper-reflexive Zoomer motormouth with a Notes app tattoo on her forearm, this writer who seems like she can only speak in the same attention-deficit digital argot in which she writes her fiction—can she really be our next major author? Or, if that’s too grandiose, can My First Book, self-consciously precocious title and all, at least be a good book?

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The Winner: A Novel

by Teddy Wayne

Harper, 320 pp., $24.00

Twenty-five year-old Conor O’Toole, fresh out of New York Law School—not New York University Law School—is spending the first summer of the pandemic on Cape Cod, giving tennis lessons to the one percent. He is a working class kid, out of Yonkers, with a dead father and an ill mother laid off from her secretarial job. Thanks to the generosity of a white shoe lawyer who wants to play better tennis, Conor has his own guesthouse, and he’s grateful for the teaching income and the time to study for the bar. He’s grateful, too, to escape the terror and the slog of COVID-era New York. The rich, he learns, play by their own rules.

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There’s an extraordinarily wealthy divorcee, Catherine, who takes lessons from Conor—except she’s not interested in bettering her game, only her sex life, and a chiseled, mid-twenties ex–college athlete will do. For larger sums of money than he’d earn teaching tennis, Conor has sex with her, and finds he enjoys it greatly, cash or no cash, even as Catherine, cool and cutthroat, grows ever more demanding. To make matters thornier, Conor’s falling for an artsy Barnard grad named Emily who reveals, as their courtship deepens, that Catherine is her mother. Neurotic Emily can’t match her mother’s mind-blowing libido, but she and Conor plainly gel, and as an heiress to a vast fortune—Catherine’s house in the fictional coastal town of Cutters Neck is worth $26 million—she might just be his ticket out of drudgery.

Catherine, as one can imagine, will not be easily dumped.

This is the premise of Teddy Wayne’s propulsive, winning, and occasionally frustrating new novel, The Winner, which arrives as something of the male counterpoint to last year’s summer sensation, The Guest. Emma Cline’s novel, about a young twenty-something hoping to trade on her looks in the Hamptons to get back in the good graces of her much wealthier and older ex—while dodging a dangerous drug-dealer back in the city—is, like The Winner, an elegant distillation of modern social dynamics, the incredibly affluent bubbling themselves in oceanfront manses as the help and the townies churn just out of reach. Conor is an uneasy witness, an insider-outsider, popping up at the cocktail parties and bobbing in their surf, passing, in part, because he is good-looking.

Wayne, who writes on male alienation as well as any contemporary American novelist, has chosen for himself a superficially different protagonist than those of his prior books, including Loner, which made the daring decision to inhabit the consciousness of a furious proto-incel at Harvard. While Loner’s David Federman is a nebbish beta who longs for alpha-hood, Conor is there already. He was a tournament tennis player in high school and starred at an unnamed D-II college, and Wayne tells us, through a close third person narration, that Conor has slept with numerous girls throughout his young life. Until Catherine and Emily arrive, his habit has been to take them in reluctantly, like an ennui-laden movie star. He’s only had one serious girlfriend and aspires to more meaningful connections.

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But Conor, like Federman, is possessed of an outsider’s fury, though his comes at a slower burn. He resents the ease and decadence of the rich; even lovely Emily, with her ability to use her trust fund to pay rent, quietly roils him. Emily wants to be a novelist and shows him a draft of a work about a girl much like herself. “The central problem Emily herself alluded to—that no one was interested in or sympathetic to how an excess of money had poisoned a rich white girl’s family—was inescapable.” Conor finds, by the end of two hundred and forty “excruciating” pages, that he “despised the teenage Alice. She was spoiled, oversensitive to any slight, the constant victim in her own mind of her absent, apathetic father and monstrously narcissistic mother.”

Hypocrisy grates Conor. By setting The Winner in 2020, Wayne is able to slyly lampoon the excesses of that summer, the obscenely rich throwing up Black Lives Matter signs and fretting over diversity trainings, the COVID hawks dropping all precautions if they find themselves at the right parties. Conor is worried about COVID until, with enough sunshine on the Cape, he’s not. “He supposed this was what normal life was like for people this rich: so removed from the ravages of the world that to be concerned by them would be like fretting over natural disasters on Mars.” His resentments are buried within; he wants to be in this world, after all, and he’s got $144,000 in law school debt to pay off. Conor’s style of tennis is emblematic of who he is, since he’s known, on the court, for his mental toughness and inability to give up on a rally. Pejoratively, he’s a pusher, but pushers can overcome more talented opponents by forcing them to make mistakes. Conor is fastidious, and he won’t be broken.

Wayne allows us to ponder what makes privilege: class, gender, race, or physique. The novel’s title comes from a pronouncement Emily makes when she dismisses Conor as a “winner,” the type of person who lacks an “interior life” and is “used to getting whatever they want without even trying.” He is not, in Emily’s view, a “funny, charming, self-loathing loser,” her usual type. There is, of course, a deep absurdity to a generational millionaire telling the son of a single diabetic mom from Yonkers that he can have whatever he wants without any effort. Emily has her own demons—we learn she spent time in a mental institution—but she will die as she was born: very, very rich. Whether she is aware of it or not, she wields extraordinary power.

But Conor, effortlessly dashing, can blend better than the more homely members of his class. He can play the part in Cape Cod. He insists, throughout the summer, he can never get a job at the law firm where his host, the man who wants to bolster his tennis game, works, since he is not a graduate of an elite law school, one Conor’s Cape acquaintances keep confusing with NYU. But lo and behold, Conor is offered a Zoom interview that is not pro forma—he gets another, and he finds his tenacity is rewarded. The corporate attorneys like what he says. Gone unsaid, but perhaps implied, is they like how he looks. David Federman could not make a go on the Cape, simultaneously shtupping a shapely mother and daughter. Conor is too hot to be a loser.

The Winner accelerates when Catherine decides to out Conor to Emily. Conor goes to extreme lengths to ensure this does not happen. Wayne is deft when it comes to making Conor’s radical actions—and his budding psychopathy—plausible. (To reveal what Conor does in the end would be a profound spoiler.) From a remove, Conor’s rationalizations are terrifying, but up close, with Wayne nudging us along, we can find the horror almost alluring, rooting for Conor, hustler that he is, to survive the jeopardy he has manifested for himself. If he was, as a poor boy drowning in law school debt and his mother’s insulin bills, a victim of Catherine’s predation—as much as he loved the sex, he was a glorified prostitute—he long transcends that status by novel’s end.

If The Winner’s pace never slackens, the prose sometimes does. Certain imagery is tangled (“July’s blinding glare slanted into the coppery haze of August”) and there are instances of Wayne straining too hard to emphasize what we know well enough—there are glaring class disparities. “Their money was a kind of vaccine,” Wayne intones. Or, when we’re deeper into Conor’s unraveling: “It was hard to miss this suggestion that a rich person’s life was considered worthier of law enforcement protection.” And another: “Already it had become clear that the pandemic’s worst comorbidity was poverty . . . .” In actuality, it was age.

And The Winner suffers from an ending that is simultaneously too open-ended and pat, and seemingly truncated, as if Wayne were in a hurry to slam the door on Conor and Emily. Clocking in at just over three hundred pages, the novel could have had more time to resolve itself, perhaps even to trail Conor beyond Cutters Neck. In that sense, it stumbles like The Guest, which was elevated by its gem-cut prose but faltered at the very end, never cohering as it should. This is a growing problem with newer novels published by major conglomerates; many of these imprints seem afraid of passing some arbitrary page count, lest attention spans are challenged or extra cash is dumped on paper. It is to Wayne’s credit the reader is left wanting more from The Winner. How does Conor, his social station elevated, adjust to life in tony Manhattan? Or, more simply, how does he truly outrun his lurid past? What happens when 2020 passes? Given another hundred pages, Wayne could have sketched a richer portrait of winners and losers, and those so desperate for the good life that they’ll succumb to depravity to keep tasting it.

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The Fire Within

by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

translated by Richard Howard, New York Review Classics, 120pp., $15.95

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s The Fire Within follows the daily malaise of a heroin-addicted literary man while both justifying and lamenting his addiction. Drieu’s protagonist, Alain Leroy, is not a failed novelist: He is a depressed, pre-failed novelist. Unfortunately, you see, Alain realizes that his own and everyone else’s most precious ideas are interchangeable and disposable; his own unhappiness deepens whenever he develops a new insight. Moreover, he fears that he might lay the world bare through his prose and confirm his worst suspicion—that deformity and corruption await all ideas and living things. 

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Thanks to an NYRB Classics reprint of Richard Howard’s pungent translation, the novel, which was published in France in 1931 as Le Feu follet, now allows readers of English to witness the gradual decline of Alain as he winds his way through Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Alain’s petite bourgeois childhood left him two desires: the desire for a bohemian, creative life liberated from work, and a contradicting expectation in which “like most of bourgeoisie, he aspired to a financial level only just above the one he had known in childhood. He had incurred, up till now, only small debts.” Money constantly slips through his fingers. Thankfully, Alain possesses a sound financial strategy to at least keep afloat. He reassures a friend, an Egyptologist named Dubourg, that “it’s only through women I have any effect on things. For me, women have always meant money.”  Dubourg responds by assessing Alain’s thought process: “So that’s your problem. You can’t love a woman without money; and you can’t love a woman with money either, because you have to love her money along with her.”  

Alain spends most of his life leeching funds from women with sizable inheritances, though never with any great success, as “he always had money, yet never had any. Always a little, never a lot.” Yet Alain cannot commit to any individual woman, as “he had had only short affairs, and withdrew immediately, discouraged by a word or a gesture . . . .” He exists as a perpetually adolescent romantic, always in the process of becoming, always attracting the next woman, but never settling upon a real lover or wanting commitment. Keep in mind that Alain is an uncommonly handsome man. 

In the novel’s first chapter, Alain departs from a seedy hotel with his current belle, Lydia, who has been cheating on her spouse with our protagonist for several months. He reluctantly recalls how “sensation slid away, elusive as a viper between two stones” and realizes how “her skin was the leather of a de luxe piece of luggage that had travelled a great deal, strong and defiled. Her breasts were forgotten emblems. She dried herself, spreading her thighs where the muscles had begun to go slack. Lydia had returned to the bathroom to paint a strange caricature of life on her dead woman’s face.” Alain then collects his allowance from her purse, and leaves without a second thought. 

Women in this novel invariably join his gallery of grotesques. Alain’s gaze reduces and deforms whatever falls within its field of view; one of the novel’s curiosities is how its protagonist persists in a monotonous impulse to diminish the ontological value of nearly every person or idea that crosses his path. I should mention that though Alain rejects academic philosophy, I suspect that his fixation on negation reflects an instinctive materialism; he thinks that each corporeal thing, rather than containing a Platonic essence, corresponds to nothing—no purpose, no definition or precept of any kind, whether spiritual or psychological. He insists upon this void of meaning. Though I should add that the emptiness of the world does not necessarily condemn him to despair. More on that later. 

Women in particular draw Alain’s eye; he remains sexually attracted to their beauty, but paranoid that their appearances mask the same emptiness within everything else. A few days after his liaison with Lydia, Alain sees a commercial photographer, Falet, on the street, and observes that “the photographer made monsters of all of his models; he deformed them . . . and coaxed an emphatic, improbable ugliness out of their faces and bodies. Eventually, beneath fingers stiffened by desperate malice, nothing of reality remained.”  And then he goes further, realizing that “there was only this moment. There was nothing else. There was nothingness.” 

Alain lives in a sanitarium and boarding house for the “the light-headed,” meaning depressed, eccentric heirs—though he remains the only solvent man in residence and the only one receiving treatment for heroin addiction. His tiny room contains, “on the night-table, detective stories or pornography, American magazines and avant-garde reviews. On the mantle, two objects: one a delicate piece of machinery, a perfectly flat platinum chronometer, the other a hideously vulgar painted plaster statuette of a naked woman that he had bought at a fair and took with him everywhere. He insisted it was pretty, but he was pleased that it polluted his life.” His life follows the same repeating cycle: He leaves in the morning to socialize with what few friends he has left before returning at night to avoid writing.

Despite seeming at the outset to be a novel of addiction,The Fire Within surprises by only occasionally mentioning Alain’s drug use. The urge occasionally grabs him, but throughout the bulk of the narrative addiction produces only a distant murmur. Stabbing heroin into a vein remains the best form of procrastination, of delaying the degradation of the adult world. Alain thinks to himself, securely, that “addicts are the mystics of a materialist age who . . . offer sacrifices to a symbolism of shadows to combat a fetishism of the sun.” Though the narration comes mostly through Alain’s (disturbed) perspective, there is a brief exception in which the authorial voice pities Alain: “for he failed to understand that in our composite age, nothing passes and all old fads continue to live, one on top of the other . . . . Thus Alain could have gone merrily on, but he was not crude enough for that.” In the novel’s most playful touch, it hints that Alain is too pure for his surroundings; perhaps the reader should consider that the world does not deserve Alain; what if he is right in clinging to a childlike state, unspoiled by hollow affectations? After all, each successive chapter implicitly confirms his long-held suspicion: that his perception, kind heart, and physical beauty will never be fully understood or reciprocated by another human being.

The Fire Within dwells almost exclusively within Alain’s anxieties. Aside from a few passing references to Parisian neighborhoods, the novel seldom acknowledges wider cultural or political mores, remaining content to stay within the world Alain and his few threadbare friendships. With only one exception: In a brief aside, the narrator contextualizes one of Alain’s addiction treatments in prose that would make the anti-liberal novelist and philosopher Ernst Jünger proud: “And here, in fact, is the enormous stupidity of our times: the doctor appeals to the patient’s will while his doctrine denies the existence of that will, declares it to be determined, divided between various determining factors. Individual will is the myth of another age; a race exhausted by civilization cannot believe in the will. Perhaps it will take refuge in constraint: the rising tyrannies of fascism and communism promise to flagellate the addicts.” 

Some readers might take this quotation as the author’s personal view of comfortable, increasingly bureaucratized civilian life in post-war Europe. After all, as Will Self’s introduction notes, Drieu mingled alternately with fascists or communists depending on how he felt on a given day; he publicly advocated for fascism in France during World War II–yet told friends in private that he admired Stalin; also, during this time, he shielded his Jewish ex-wife and her friends from persecution during German occupation. His seemingly schizophrenic patchwork of ideology in the public and private spheres gives the impression of a provocateur lacking in self-reflection—or perhaps crying out for attention.

I suspect that Drieu wrote The Fire Within to reckon with the conflicting personas he amassed throughout his life. His creation, Alain, prevaricates when presented with choices. To commit to Lydia; to reconcile with his ex-wife, Dorothy; to commit to recovery from drug use; to hold himself to the promises he makes his friends—or to promises made to himself regarding his literary ambition. Like his creator, Alain is fractured by unfulfilled promises, each of which leads down a path that excludes the others. 

He dreads finishing his manuscript, The Ticketless Traveler, most of all, because “writing, whose meshes ceaselessly gather and combine all the diffuse forces of human life . . . had taken a path that led directly to the grave mysteries that he had always avoided. Since he was . . . no longer choked by those feelings which were . . . so tightly knotted because they had never been articulated . . . he completed two or three pages . . . but he had barely got it underway again before it faltered and collapsed once more in that white wasteland. His friend Dubourg telephoned, and Alain delightedly accepted an invitation to lunch.”

Alain dislikes how psychological and scientific rationalizations appear in every social encounter, whether he is among wards of sanitarium or attending parties among the erudite. At heart, he cannot tolerate even the slightest amount of abstraction. Not due to his lacking intelligence or imagination, but because concepts are weightless to him relative to an object in his hand or the hunger of his sexual organ. 

Alain is not troubled by the lack of inherent meaning in the world, but he feels pain when malleable, academic assumptions—whether from his doctor or Dubourg—pretend to define the world. In spite his literary pretensions, his perspective is pre-intellectual. He is man of lustful, radical simplicity. His uncommonly handsome face—the book never lets us forget this detail—should exempt him from the ordinary burdens of life. Dubourg observes to Alain that “[y]ou were made to be loved and taken care of by a beautiful woman. At least a few people should be able to escape this horrible compulsion to work.” 

The sensitive, literary young man of 2024 will see much of himself in this novel.  Alain reflects such a man’s worst impulses: vanity, perpetual adolescence, and resignation to being a “failson” whose creative potential—though allegedly profound—always remains slightly out of reach. The Fire Within invites us to excuse this listlessness; could it be that, like Alain, today’s sensitive, literary young man was born into a world unworthy of his attention and effort? Though Alain contains the sensitivity and insight of a Henry James or a Mikhail Bulgakov, such gifts are wasted upon an audience of philistines who filter everything—even the most delicate musings of the soul—through a morass of information and social science. While the republication of The Fire Within is well-timed for comparisons to the current literary scene, the novel should not be solely viewed as a diagnosis of creative “failsons.” I do not want to detract from its formal strangeness, especially with regard to its creation of Alain’s interior life. 

Richard Howard’s translation from French impresses—conversations often churn with a peculiar, paranoid rhythm entirely appropriate to the text. Though The Fire Within implies (or outright states) through Alain that the world is void of meaning, “that it has no substance,” the reader should not treat this sentiment as statement of despair. Absence of meaning is simply the only abstract judgement that Alain allows himself. As a sensual creature who only values tactility, he fantasizes about indulging impulses and disregarding all the scripted affectations and rationalizations that seem to follow him. But even his lust only leads to a woman’s inevitable attachment and her desire for marriage.

Alain, the sensitive soul, the handsome face, returns to the same mental holding pattern each night, in which he “still returned for long periods to the idea he had cherished all through his youth–a youth that was coming to an end, for he had just turned thirty, and thirty is a lot for a boy with nothing in his favor but his looks—the idea that everything would be taken care of by women.”

“He did not know what to do, because he had never done anything.”

“And the drugs, then?”

“That’s the solution to the problem.”