Author Archives: John Hendel

Ralph Ellison: Far From Invisible

Back in August, The Washington Post announced a new book from Ralph Ellison is forthcoming next year. The name should ring some bells. Surely one novel comes to mind for you, but can you think of another? If you can’t, don’t feel too bad—there isn’t one, at least yet.

Greatness can be a curious phenomenon, especially with writers. One-hit wonders flare up all the time in the literary world. Harper Lee and Emily Bronte became household names for their first and only novels.

The name Ralph Ellison shows up in school syllabi around the world due to his hallmark achievement Invisible Man, published in 1952. The book’s 581 pages chronicle the epic journey of one nameless black man as he becomes involved with a variety of types, from white sympathizers to a socialist syndicate. I first read the book in high school but have found myself constantly returning to its vision over the years.

While Ellison did not publish another novel in his lifetime, he never stopped obsessing over a second. Scholars have pored over his notes and drafts for years, trying to make sense of it all. One version was disappointingly published as Juneteenth in 1999. However, according to the Post article, Ellison left behind enough unpublished writing for ten novels (the material fills eighty computer disks). Despite the volume of writings, his drafts were all from the same second potential novel, which was always on the verge of completion.

Ellison intended his second novel to be even more epic than the first: a political tour de force, sprawling with multiple points of view and even wider-ranging themes. Uncertainty crippled his efforts, though. Before he died in 1994, he told the New Yorker he still hoped to finish and publish the book, but said that his doubts slowed the process. After his death, the world discovered the wealth of notes, chapters, and musings on the work hidden in his house—“Ellison had not suffered from writer’s block, after all,” the article reveals. “He had writer’s fury.”

Two literary scholars—Ellison’s old friend and senior scholar John Callahan and the thirty-three-year-old Harvard graduate Adam Bradley—spent years ironing out the differences between all the drafts to reveal this new Ellison work. They color-coded different drafts and put as much thought into deciphering the final novel as Ellison put into shaping it.

Modern Library will publish the result of their endless sifting next year, though “the page count has not been finalized.” I imagine elements of Juneteenth will appear in the work—the Senator, the black preacher, action in Washington D.C.—but I don’t know. The contents of this new novel have yet to be revealed, but Callahan has remarked that readers will find something here that will blow their minds.

I personally cannot wait. Even if fear and obsessive revision kept this work from readers during the forty-year period of its writing, I’m grateful that Ellison’s voice will live on in a second work.

Reaching voters who read

With all the flurry over the coming presidential election, you’d think it were happening this November instead of in 2008. Countless debates and headlines have made it clear that this will be one of the more heated elections in a while, and most voters are still working to distinguish among the abundance of candidates lining the battlefield: the Law and Order TV star, the former First Lady, the 9/11 mayor of New York City, and more.

One candidate has stood out due to his books, though, and I find that incredibly fascinating. I picked up first-time Senator Barack Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, last week and found myself pleasantly surprised—the man can write. While Obama has made a splash with his charismatic speeches (as at the 2004 Democratic Convention) and his Senate term, his two best-selling books (Dreams and The Audacity of Hope) have in large part legitimized his run for president and contributed to much of the celebrity that surrounds him.

The first memoir intrigues me more because Obama wrote it before the spotlight consumed him. The book was published in 1995, after he left law school, and paints the portrait of a young man struggling in terms of race and origin and purpose.

Obama’s book gave me a refreshing glimpse into the candidate’s mind. He writes lyrically about growing up in Hawaii and his fractured family, often providing extensive backgrounds of about his family members. He’ll own up to a partying lifestyle of drugs in college as well as his struggles motivating the poor communities of Chicago to action and social justice. Race always dominates—how to grow up a foreigner in Indonesia, how to live as one of the few black students in his Hawaiian school, how to develop a connection with his father’s homeland of Kenya.

Sure, other politicians have written books before, but what distinguishes this one is the quality of the writing and the honest autobiography, which lays out Obama’s personality in a memoir before the election fame. I wish other candidates on both sides of the aisle had done the same. Hillary Clinton wrote Living History in 2004, which I give her credit for, but the book plays it safe and was likely written with 2008 already in mind. Obama’s first book hit the world over a decade before this election.

I like that a candidate can achieve his fame and position through the power of his words. Let’s hope that continues.

A World of Possibilities

It always amazes me when I hear about the dwindling literary readership. The subject comes up in meetings for The Missouri Review from time to time, noted with apathy or lament or sometimes just this simple observation: people care less about literature now than fifty or a hundred years ago. Matt Pearce compared the modern literary scene to tundra in his last blog entry on this site, and that’s not far off.

But this reality astonishes me. The average person’s potential to achieve and learn has increased exponentially in the last hundred years, and even more dramatically in the last ten years, in the last five, even. In America and elsewhere, modern access to knowledge presents a potent vehicle for education. Sure, college costs soar and the professional educational system can, in many cases, be in shambles, but I’m talking about something a little deeper and more important than that.

Let me explain.

A scene from the movie Good Will Hunting always stands out in my mind. The genius protagonist, Will, is looking to impress a woman in a bar and gets into a confrontation with a young Harvard know-it-all. Will shows up the Harvard guy by quoting from textbooks to tear the other man’s arguments to shreds. Finally he takes a jab at the expensive college education itself: “Fifty years from now you’re gonna do some thinking on your own and realize,” Will says, “that you wasted $150,000 on an education that you could’ve gotten for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.”

This statement really hit home with my young mind in the late ’90s. A person with a will to read and learn can walk into any library and open almost any book from the evolving canon of world literature.

The last decade has offered even more opportunities with the onset of the digital age. Not only do books exist for free at the local library, but older books are found in their entirety online. Websites like Bartleby and Project Gutenberg present countless works of prose and poetry that are no longer copyrighted. I interned for a political campaign in 2006 for a few weeks and read about half of This Side of Paradise online on my down hours.

Now, more than ever in history, any person on the streets can choose to learn anything they want from a library or a website. One might imagine this would produce the most enlightened generation ever, a world of streetside Shakespeares and coffeeshop Newtons. Yet it’s not the case, and to all of you reading this, I’m essentially asking you why.

Sure, I’ve got some of my own ideas. Just look back through the TMR Blog for some good starting points. My last entry mentioned a British publisher cutting classics down in size for more convenient reads. Alex Streiff talked about the lack of letter writing and the breakdown of eloquent communication. Patrick referenced financial blows to the independent publishing industry. Increasingly a gap separates the literary audience and the broader population, which seems a bit bizarre. The world’s poised for a new and wider-ranging renaissance, given our new options and access to knowledge–people would just have to want it first.

What’s happening to the literary readership? Is it still out there, perhaps transforming with the new trends in media and communication? Maybe a person who in decades past would have been a famed poet now seizes the opportunities and creative outlets of YouTube. Perhaps those who would have relished the restless prose of Marcel Proust a half century ago now find more satisfaction in a good HBO series they rented on DVD. I don’t know. I’m curious about your thoughts.

The Perils of Literary Laziness

I’m not a fast reader. I’ve improved with experience and age, but it usually takes me awhile to get through any hefty tome. Still, a good book always seems worth my time, so this has never troubled me—after all, reading’s not the most challenging activity in the world.

Or so I thought. Recent news shows the publishing world is throwing a bone to the less-than-dedicated readers of the world.

British publisher Orion Books recently issued its first set of scaled-down classics, with dozens more so-called “Compact Editions” planned for the future. The publisher slashed thirty to forty percent of each classic work of literature, axing whole chapters at times. The first novels to face the chopping block included Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters.

The publisher, calling their collection great reads “in half the time,” explained its actions as benevolent—people could read more classics and expand their cultural knowledge this way, the publisher emphasized. It claimed that most people thought of “classics” as long, slow, and boring. While that may be true for the average reader, this certainly is not a call to shred old masterworks.

Literature should challenge its readers, and this butchery degrades it for convenience. Instant gratification isn’t everything; cutting more than a third of Tolstoy will hurt the original writing and won’t create a comparable read. The literary experience calls for build-up and foreshadowing on the part of the writer, which, if the reader is patient, can lead to a disarming catharsis. Sometimes this happens to take a thousand pages. If those thousands pages are integral to the author’s masterpiece, then I’ll happily tough that out.

I liked reading the Great Illustrated Classics series as a kid, but this strategy, marketed to adult readers, just promotes laziness. The publisher seems to think a quick read matters more than quality prose. Sparknotes would probably serve a reader better than these watered-down versions.

Convenience permeates everything these days, given the Internet, text messaging, and Ipods, and this convenience has begun to extend to language itself. The BBC recently published an article about the Simplified Spelling Society . The group works to standardize the English language, making spelling more phonetic and flexible. Fears of instant-message jargon leap to mind for me (spellings of “I luv u” and “good nite”). I’ll grant you that English is a messy language, but precision can be positive, and I know I would be driven insane by a world where “ennywun” spelled so loosely. Please, folks, let’s just try to use the language we’ve all agreed on.

Of course, these events are mere trends of the moment and unlikely to make any dent in the literary world. Anyone with an inclination to seriously read Tolstoy or Dickens in the first place will likely opt for the real deal, and a small-time organization that boycotts spelling bees is not going to overturn the power of Funk and Wagnalls (or Strunk and White, for that matter).

For those who don’t relish the hundreds of pages of War and Peace, though, rest assured. Orion Books promises another set of compact classics in September: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady. Personally, I think I’m going to keep plodding through the big literary works page by page—reading all the pages, not just 60 percent—and feel satisfied with that.

A Libyan 1984

Evelyn mentioned the Man Booker International Prize in a recent blog post and the cultural impact of Things Fall Apart. That novel rejected the school of thought that Africa was simply a heart of darkness and shed light on the troubling situations of a changing Nigeria. Her entry reminded me of an incredibly powerful debut novel of 2006 from a Libyan writer named Hisham Matar. His book, In The Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker annual prize for fiction in 2006. It’s a haunting read and a grim reflection on the last few decades of the author’s country.

The book tackles the events in Libya in the 1970s in an almost autobiographical way, looking at the rise of Colonel Gaddafi’s police state through the eyes of nine-year-old narrator Suleiman. Hisham Matar himself spent many of his formative years living in Libya before moving to London.

The novel resonates with vast implications about the politics and emotional conflicts surrounding young Suleiman. In fact, his youth makes the book all the more intriguing and terrifying. He watches as his neighbors disappear and Gaddafi’s police harass his own family. The government taps phones and holds show trials. The surreal, almost claustrophobic intrusion brings to mind Orwell’s searing portrait of totalitarianism in 1984, but with one key difference—Matar writes mainly from experience, about realities, not from the imagination, about some dystopian future.

Literature has the ability to tap into greater sociopolitical consciousness and transcend immediate emotional drama (still important, of course), which is what Matar has accomplished here. The works that combine such searing social insight with masterful writing lead to some of the true enduring classics. In the Country of Men succeeds as a disturbing and poignant portrait of a nation still fraught with the effects of Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution, while building an emotional core and tension worthy of a classic. The young Suleiman finds himself more concerned about his immature games with the neighbor boys, even as his alcoholic mother grows more troubled and the government more invested in the family’s home. The narrator finds himself looking back at the situations as an adult, however, and that new light offers stark clarity about the real situations involved. It’s even more astonishing to consider that this is a debut effort from Matar.

Fresh voices illuminate new perspectives and new worlds of thought and culture. Cheers to Hisham Matar and his first work. He’s starting this century off on the right foot.