J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul

In preparation for J.C. Hallman's reading with InDigest 1207, Tin House Books has kindly allowed us to re-post Hallman's recent and upcoming blog posts from their blog.

In the fourth and final installment of J.C. Hallman's series of essays about his forthcoming book The Story About the Story he discusses what makes the essays in that book stand apart from traditional literary criticism. Thanks to Tin House Books and J.C. Hallman for partnering with InDigest to bring you this series of essays.

J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul

The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways. They contemplate rather than argue. They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity. They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it. And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics--the history, the process, the purpose--of literature itself.

I didn't quite mean to do this when I started collecting pieces for the book, but the essays in The Story About the Story add up to a solid century's worth of literary wisdom--straight from the horses' mouths.

This wisdom takes a number of forms.

Cynthia Ozick ("Truman Capote Reconsidered") begins with an elegant aphorism: "Time at length becomes justice." Similarly, Nabokov ("'The Metamorphosis'") introduces Kafka with a rapid-fire definition of art, "Beauty plus pity," a maxim that a few pages later is met with Camus' insistence ("Herman Melville") that Melville is the furthest thing from Kafka but still offers "inexhaustible sources of strength and pity."



Other contributors suggest trends. Michael Chabon ("The Other James") recalls that "all stories...descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves in the woods all around..." and Frank O'Connor ("An Author in Search of a Subject") contrasts Katherine Mansfield with "Joyce and Proust, who in their different, more worldly ways were also attempting a magical approach to literature by trying to make the printed page not a description of something that had happened but a substitute for what had happened."

The book's essays often seek to make the effect and purpose of reading a visceral experience. William Gass ("In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life") describes beginning a book ("How easy it is to enter. An open book, an open eye, and the first page lifts toward us like a fragrance...") and Susan Sontag ("Loving Dostoevsky"), on ending one, is "purged, shaken, fortified, breathing a little deeper, grateful to literature for what it can harbor and exemplify."

On the stakes of literature, Robert Hass ("Lowell's Graveyard") finds a metaphor for a poem's capacity to change life irrevocably: "Poems take place in your life, or some of them do, like the...day the trucks came and the men began to tear up the wooden sidewalks and the cobblestone gutters outside your house and laid down new cement curbs and asphalt streets." Charles D'Ambrosio ("Salinger and Sobs") unapologetically articulates why he reads at all: "Admittedly, wanting practical advice is a pretty primitive idea of what a book should do, but...I didn't know any better, and probably still don't."

Walter Kirn ("Good-bye, Holden Caulfield. I Mean It. Go! Good-Bye!") reveals the true life of books: "People tell me that the mark of a great book is the way that it sticks with you, stays vivid over time, but I disagree. The best books fade into the scenery, dissolve into instant backdrop, return to dust. But that dust is never the same; it's changed forever." And E.B. White, writing of Thoreau, proposes that the reader-writer relationship is much more than a contract: "He is a better companion than most, and I would not swap him for a soberer or more reasonable friend even if I could."

Sven Birkerts ("On a Stanza by John Keats") sets out to question the whole business of writing about reading--"Is beauty that has been made out of words impervious to other words?" To which Phyllis Rose (an excerpt from The Year of Reading Proust) offers an answer: "No matter how full we make our accounts of reading...what we produce is less than the text it describes."

But of course, what's at stake in the writing life is more than just chat. Seamus Heaney ("Learning from Eliot") reminds us that a writer's life means "the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life."

The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.

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Courtesy of Tin House and reprinted from their blog.

J.C. Hallman will be reading in New York as part of the InDigest 1207 Reading Series on October 7 at 6pm.

J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. His work has appeared in GQ, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He is working on a book about modern expressions of utopian thought.

J.C. Hallman: "Kafka? I love Kafka. He's very - Kafkaesque."

In preparation for J.C. Hallman's reading with InDigest 1207, Tin House Books has kindly allowed us to re-post Hallman's recent and upcoming blog posts from their blog. Thanks very much to Tin House and to J.C. Hallman.

J.C. Hallman: "Kafka? I love Kafka. He's very - Kafkaesque."

Anthologies are notorious for a number of reasons. The books have too many words on each page. They're way too expensive because they're intended as textbooks. And they're never quite as comprehensive as they're meant to be.

The Story About the Story is an attempt to correct all that.

One of the reasons anthologies prove problematic is the whole business of permissions. I went into the process of obtaining permissions for this book with a degree of curiosity and the tenacity of a visionary. But if I'd known what I was getting myself into I probably never would have started. The permissions labyrinth is a maze manned by a squadron of unruly Minotaurs, and I quickly found that as a single Theseus I wasn't going to be able to find my way through it alone. After about a month of phone calls I was at the end of my string, as it were.



The problem with The Story About the Story was multi-fold. When we write about reading, we want to cite things, to use examples--these become permissions issues, too. Furthermore, for an anthology like this to have any chance at succeeding, it needs to have the possibility of getting to foreign markets, at least the UK (a number of the writers in The Story About the Story are British--from Woolf and Wilde to De Botton and Dyer). This meant that each essay actually wound up requiring multiple permissions. The prize for most went to Edward Hirsch. The short selection from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry required two permissions for the text itself (US and UK), two permissions for the Plath poem it explicates, and a permission for a few lines from poet Miklós Radnóti.

Five permissions for one essay. The average permission for The Story About the Story was $150.00 Thirty-one essays in the book.

The budget was $3500.00.

I'm not complaining! True, I wound up in the red on The Story About the Story, but I had never hoped to make a profit, and money wasn't the biggest problem I encountered. The biggest problem was a new descent into the Kafkaesque.

Probably the most famous essay reprinted in The Story About the Story is Vladimir Nabokov's take on Kafka, "The Metamorphosis." Or, rather, "'The Metamorphosis.'" Remember that. Perhaps for ease of use, or perhaps frustrated that "Franz Kafka" becomes an anagram for absolutely nothing else (including any number of words), Nabokov gave his wonderful lecture on Kafka's story the same title as the story itself. He probably didn't realize that this would become a well-laid man-trap in a maze already overpopulated with monsters.

I won't name the publisher who actually wound up owning the rights to Nabokov's essay (though with a little imagination, it's easy enough to figure out), but trouble began almost as soon as I wrote to them about this piece and couple others. Alas, they rejoined, we don't control the rights to Nabokov's "The Metamorphosis." That was controlled by an agency in the UK, which after a few additional calls turned out to be a subsidiary of Random House UK.

Ah, silly me, I thought. I'm such a novice. But fortunately I have good, informed people to help me along on my path. I wrote to Random House UK.

They wrote back almost at once, kindly explaining that Vladimir Nabokov had not actually written "The Metamorphosis," Franz Kafka did, and it was published in a book called In the Penal Colony in 1910.

I took a closer look at the email from the initial permissions department. They had no idea what they were doing.

I called to explain. Nabokov's essay on Kafka was about a story called "The Metamorphosis," and the essay was, in an admittedly confusing

fashion, also called "'The Metamorphosis.'" They did in fact, I said, control the rights to the essay.

No, we don't, they said. There followed a somewhat tense exchange. Nabokov's essay "The Metamorphosis," they insisted, had first been published in a book by Franz Kafka called In the Penal Colony in 1910. That was the information they had.

I should have just run with it from there - but I didn't. Why, I argued, would an essay by a writer two generations further on, an essay about a Kafka story, appear in the same book in which the story was first published? How was that even possible?

There was silence on the other end of the line.

I put the pieces together for them, using my new knowledge of the permissions maze. What seemed most likely was that Nabokov himself had been required to seek permission for the sections he wanted to quote from Kafka. The story was public domain now, but it wasn't when Nabokov was writing, so the agency that was eventually sold to Random House UK gave permission for the excerpts, not the essay.

We'll look into it, they said. A few hours later I received a confirmation that they did, in fact, control rights to the essay. I would receive a contract shortly.

Victory! Castle doors open wide! Acquittal in the trial of the century!

In a few days, the contract arrived. For the English language rights in the United States alone, they asked $6,190.00. As well, I'd need to obtain the translation rights for the excerpts Nabokov had originally used.

For a moment, I had what is commonly known as a "hissy fit." Then I called my agent, Devin McIntyre. I can't do this, I said. I need to quit. This is insane. Devin did what he always does when I call in a panic, ranting about something. He said nothing. He knew his job was simply to listen. (I assume he was playing computer solitaire.) He was better than a chatty Kafka character, but not by much.

I called Lee Montgomery at Tin House. I begged her for help. She agreed, but reminded me that my agent had sold Tin House the book on the assurance that I would do all the legwork myself. He'd never told me this. (To his credit, he sacrificed his agent's cut of our advance to the cause of permissions. Never has an agent worked so hard for absolutely nothing.)

About forty-eight hours later I was calm again. That was really just the beginning. I started the process of talking them down to a reasonable price, which took a while. And I still needed both the translation rights (US and UK), and the UK rights for the essay itself, and then there was the whole hassle of the drawings that Nabokov had made of Kafka's beetle, and of the inside of the Samsa flat. Images in a book are a whole different maze with a new set of Minotaurs.

But it all got done. And there aren't too many of Nabokov's words on the page. And it's reasonably priced. And there is handsome art. And you can use it for a class, or just read it--because it's great fucking stuff.

And there are thirty other essays in the book, besides.

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Courtesy of Tin House and reprinted from their blog.

J.C. Hallman will be reading in New York as part of the InDigest 1207 Reading Series on October 7 at 6pm.

J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. His work has appeared in GQ, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He is working on a book about modern expressions of utopian thought.

J.C. Hallman: Driving The Stake

In preparation for J.C. Hallman's reading with InDigest 1207, Tin House Books has kindly allowed us to re-post Hallman's recent and upcoming blog posts from their blog. Thanks very much to Tin House and to J.C. Hallman.

J.C. Hallman: Driving The Stake

The whole question of beginnings is tricky—a point Geoff Dyer makes about D.H. Lawrence’s poetry in the excerpt of Out of Sheer Rage reprinted in The Story About the Story:

“Who can say when a poem begins to stir, to germinate, in the soil of the writer’s mind? There are certain experiences waiting to happen: like the snake at Lawrence’s water trough, the poem is already there, waiting for him. The poem is waiting for circumstance to activate it, to occasion its being written.”

The same may apply to editing anthologies.

Okay, an anthology is not a poem. The Story About the Story is not something I, as its editor, created or wrote. (That’s actually why I can tell you it’s a great book—I didn’t write it.) But it’s not just an anthology either, or at least I hope it’s not. I hope it’s a clarion call. I hope it changes the world—of course I do. Is that conceited? Probably. Would it be worth doing if it didn’t have a shot at accomplishing just that? Probably not.

So I’ll just assume at the outset here that the beginning of an anthology is interesting. But it’s still tricky—and I might not be able to tell you what exact circumstance resulted in its being edited.



Did the idea for The Story About the Story begin when my agent somewhat reluctantly agreed to send out a book proposal to a select group of publishers? Or did it begin when I started collecting essays of “creative criticism” to use as texts for a course at the University of Pennsylvania, a class that stemmed from a five-page essay I’d written on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw? Or when that five-page essay had itself begun as a seventy-page thesis written at Johns Hopkins? Or, years before that, when I first taught The Turn of the Screw and wondered why my students thought it was about sex? Or when I spoiled a first date with an English Ph.D. student who insisted that every use of the word “queer” in The Turn of the Screw was “loaded” (which is a load of shit)?

All of those are important moments, but perhaps not critical ones. None of them occasioned the book.

Dracula did.

I have a bad habit of arguing with critic types. Theory-based critics, folks who go to scholarly conferences to make friends with peers who will peer-review them through the 120-pages of published material—or whatever the standard is—that they need for the tenure that will ensure that they spend the rest of their lives attending more scholarly conferences. It’s hopeless, I know—but I can’t resist picking a fight. I want to fight about authorial intent. I want to believe—as Henry James did—that it is the producer with whom we are attempting to communicate when we consider the art of literature. (I’m paraphrasing “The Art of Fiction.”) That is, when you read, you communicate with the writer. But what seems obvious to me and to all people still in possession of their souls is a blind spot to most critics.

So we squabble. I’ve ruined garden parties, been rude to people in their homes. I don’t care. I want to pen people in, get them to acknowledge that even though critics employ a standard, scientific hypothesis-proof model in their writing, no one actually winds up “proving” anything in lit crit. In fact, their “arguments” tend to be unpersuasive because they are theories born of passion that are then translated into analysis as dry as a corpse and as boring as binary code. In other words, it’s dishonest. Why do this? I ask. The answer is always the same: that’s the way it’s done.

Even people who know that it shouldn’t be done that way do it that way.

I could live with that. I could live with good people stuck in a bad system. But those people are not the only people here. It’s the other people who occasioned The Story About the Story.

I was at a dinner party one night. There was a nice pork loin and a big oval table, and good wine, and cheerful table-talk through the main course. Then, somehow, the subject of “good books” came up—by which was meant a common standard of objective aesthetic merit. Another tricky subject, to be sure, but not one that necessarily has to lead to discord. In fact, precisely to establish some common ground, I threw out what seemed to me—in a room full of sophisticated readers—to be a fairly obvious truth: a book like Dracula, say, had been very popular, of course, but it was in fact a very poorly-written book.

There was silence for a moment. And then the Victorianist next to me said, “I like Dracula.”

Was I itching for a fight? Had I drunk too much? Probably. But I didn’t steer the conversation directly to authorial intent. First, I allowed that bad books can make for interesting subject matter. Indeed, I was then writing a book about the history of utopian literature—an entire genre almost uniformly horrific from an aesthetic perspective. (The only utopian novel I would remotely defend is Austin Tappen Wright’s Islandia, which is hopelessly romantic.) Of course this was already hinting at semiotics, and I knew all that, not just from Roland Barthes, but from Charles Peirce. (Peirce was close friend of William James, the subject of the last book I’d written.) So I knew the origin of the whole sign-and-signify thing, and I thought it was great when applied to things like professional wrestling and television commercials and beer bottle labels. But literature? No, not literature! Good, serious books were written by good, serious people who knew what they wanted to say! People who took pains—suffered!—to say it. To assume that you could treat books with authors in the same way you treated authorless “texts” was an abomination. And to then turn around and assign some standard of quality to a book that had an author, but might as well have been authorless (Stoker having merely organized a set of tropes bouncing around in vampire literature for a hundred years by the time he came along), was not only wrong, boring, and frightening, it was actually a pretty good description of what’s become of the modern practice of literary criticism.

I won’t describe the melee that followed—suffice it to say we corked the wine and some people went home early. Relationships were compromised. Not that I’m bothered by it. What I came away with was a new sense of impetus, a new drive. I’d taught my old class on “creative criticism” having only ever read the non-creative version of it, and my squabbles with critics had to that point been only border skirmishes where a siege, a campaign, a war, was needed. Now I’d crossed bayonets with the hapless living dead of the enemy itself, the army of theorists who planned to suck the life out of literature just as life had been sucked out of them. I needed to do more than reach out to students a dozen at a time. I needed to drive a stake into the dead beating heart of the Beast, and leave him rotting in his coffin.

So I compiled my own army, my battalion of good souls, in The Story About the Story. If you have a soul, too, you will recognize yourself here, life peering out at life, resuscitating books, finding glory where once dwelt impotent proof.

The Story About the Story will be available October 1 from Tin House Books.
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J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. His work has appeared in GQ, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He is working on a book about modern expressions of utopian thought.