Each year at Christmas I sew up some chapbooks for friends and family with bits of poetry or CNF I’ve published during the year. This piece poured out after reading Daniel Mendelsohn while thinking about my current WIP on fantasy. It’s not the sort of thing I can send anywhere, so call this blog a small Christmas gift. (please don’t take the footnotes too seriously—I didn’t… And excuse the extent of the allusions. They’re on purpose)

Tying Three Loops: A Spell for the Modrybedd

The farm boy stepped across the threshold into the den of the three modrybedd. They were purveyors of magic in a grotto smudged by tobacco and the steam of black sludge roasting on the burner until brown rings encircled the glass pot a finger’s width apart. That acrid knot of smoke and roasted coffee bound something up that slipped beyond its own moment and place. He’d been nervous to enter, not really knowing why, which is the way of young boys, but the shelves of books in spine-broken paperbacks with tales of adventure called. The front window had copies of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with the muscled Cimmerian in a variety of flexing postures and titles in coloured inline and outline typefaces. It promised much more inside and on the shelves. Something beyond the Black River. Something to salve his disappointment in the unkept promise of Mundania.

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Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate¹ hinges on the role of ring composition, by means of which he revised his stubborn drafts for An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.² He also reflects at length on the traumatic experience of researching and writing his family’s history in the Holocaust.³ I knew him primarily from his translations of C.P. Cavafy⁴ and then our fleeting interaction about Lawrence Durrell’s translations of the Greek poet that I had edited.⁵ That’s what brought me to his slim book of reflections deriving from the 2019 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia.⁶ I thought his nostos⁷ to Charlottesville might echo the homing pain of a dear friend who also made an odyssey out of returning to the Dell.⁸ For Mendelsohn, “In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression…, although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end too be a circle, since the narration will return.”⁹ This derives from Homer, and Mendelsohn mostly dispenses with the repetition of “a formulaic line”¹⁰ in his own rings. In An Odyssey, these are certainly rings, but in Three Rings the reader cannot help thinking of how we teach braided form in the creative writing seminar.¹¹ His three stories weave rather than encircle. Like many parts of the creative writing workshop, braided form is useful because it is teachable, like “show don’t tell” and “less is more.” For academics, however, these rings recall the chiasmus,¹² and Mendelsohn’s frequent contrasts between Homer and the Bible may make us mindful of studies of chiastic structure in the story of the flood¹³ and even the Sermon on the Mount.¹⁴ While not exactly rings, these cycles of recurrence are familiar ground, and at the scale of Three Rings they feel distinctly more like a plait rather than the formal recurrences of the chiastic structure in Homer.

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The farm boy entered the world as a foundling. Swaddled like a tiny three-pound bundle of butter, he grew up not remembering the loving arms that held him for his first week. When he had grown large enough for adoption, a young couple chose him to travel north to a new home in a tiny village amidst the weavings of the Skeena River, nestled between soaring mountains capped in snow and rich forests of cedar and hemlock. He was also marked as an infant with a small, circular scar in the middle of his chest as if a tiny circlet had been raised on his skin from a missing chain hung around his neck. It felt like magic. Later they moved again to the Fraser Valley where the Village Bookshop in the centre of a grove of alder offered magic and dreams of a world larger and distant. No matter how far he travelled later in life, he always remembered the comforting smell of trees dripping in rain redolent of verdant evergreen and moss. He would climb, happy, in the trees and hide under them with a book, and the boughs around their home were fecund with apples, cherries, bitter plums, and the bright berries of the ash that can only be eaten after cooking. Only years later did he learn that the berries of the dogwood could also be eaten, like tiny, thin-fleshed lychee.

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Piers Anthony is one of the fantasy writers from my childhood, and I share with Dennis Wilson Wise a keen memory of his Author’s Notes at the end of his novels (Wise 86). These set me thinking of a writing life. I also share Wise’s hesitations over the hermeneutics of suspicion, or at least a recognition that authors earning a living wage will rarely chastise their readership’s biases for the sake of placating future critics. In his memoir How Precious Was That While, Anthony tells a story about Lester del Rey and his fellow fantasy novelist Gordon R. Dickson. It is hauntingly prescient of Mendelsohn’s meditation, as if some kind of rope bound the two together, both of them meditating on the writing labour of building a saleable book:

I read [Dickson’s novel The Dragon and the George] and liked it, though I could see where he had used a loop — that is, an inserted episode that didn’t relate to the rest of the novel — to lengthen it to exactly 100,000 words, to make Lester del Rey’s minimum for the fantasy line. (How 266)

His observation is that del Rey set a word requirement, neither under nor over, and this was part of the commercial target of the industry, parallel to its target market of pubescent boys. It was readers of fantasy buying by the pound and expecting weight to match the scale without any thumbs or lead dropped on to tip it over. The mechanism to meet this is the “loop” by which a separate short story makes up the necessary ballast to keep the book aright and stable in the rough waters of industrial production. Books need to be well-balanced on the wine-dark sea. And like shipping, the ballast can be tossed in or out as needed based on the cargo, with some name swaps and new descriptions to shift it over to another ship that’s too light on cargo to stay upright. We see it most often now in the trivial side stories or interruptions in TV or streaming shows that add length to meet the 45-minute hour.

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Perhaps the most surprising thing for Mendelsohn’s book is the primacy of the academic. Of his Three Great Rings of elven kings, the “Exile, Narrative, and Fate” of the subtitle, there is also One Ring to rule them all: an unnamed, unspoken ring of power. Sauron’s ring is scholarship — this can be no surprise to academics thinking of “Reader B” and the timelines of peer review (hint: slow…). The editor who suggested the ring composition form to Mendelsohn called him with feedback “within a day,”¹⁵ a process that made this scholarly editor laugh out loud at its implausibility for any academic who doesn’t occupy an endowed chair.

Beneath and behind all three rings of the book is a series of connections to the scholarly life of research, citations, academic power-plays, and the exigencies of library access and publishing. Fantasy novels trace the hidden lineage of the boy who would be king — academics trace the pedigree of institutional affiliation, supervisors, and committee members. Like the other rings in the book, this is truly a thread that weaves in and out of the braids. We are far closer to hair threading here with parallel braids of the three narratives sharing a common cotton threading to hold them all in place. His third person narration of the towering academic Eric Auerbach’s scholarship runs in line with gestures to Mendelsohn’s own research work and classroom preparations, as well as W.A.A. van Otterlo’s work on ring composition¹⁶ and various scholars’ work on François Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus.¹⁷

The book is mercifully bereft of footnotes, but the academic reader can’t help but glance for them every other page. I later discovered that I’m also not alone in seeking annotations here.¹⁸ There’s also a lingering feeling that a less masculine approach might have lingered over Mary Douglas’ final book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition,¹⁹ itself the product of the Terry Lectures²⁰ established at Yale University over a century ago. Perhaps the secularism of Jefferson’s vision and the leaning of the Page-Barbour Lectures is simply incompatible with the sacred perspective of the Terry Lectures.

Academia, of course, follows the funding in a world of fellowships and endowments that remind us that the ivory tower is more costly than actual ivory. To be free from crass commercialism is to be a gracious and grateful guest in the house of patronage.

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Anthony also points to structure and commercial pressures in fantasy form. It is not, however, the Homeric form of ring composition that captures his eye. For his own commercial work, he recounts parting ways with the Del Rey imprint and having Lester del Rey as his editor. He asks himself,

Did I regret leaving Del Rey? I watched David Eddings fantasy series at Del Rey rise up and pass mine in sales, his income advancing accordingly, and yes, I was sorry to be gone. But I wouldn’t pay the price Eddings may have paid, sacrificing the integrity of my text…, even with such seemingly frivolous fantasy as Xanth. There are elements there the critics know nothing of. (How 168–169)

He rightly recognizes that “Lester del Rey was an apt editor who knew a commercial novel when he saw one… and became arguably the most successful book editor the genre has seen” (How 479–480). Yet behind the scenes, the David Eddings archives at Reed College²¹ show that the limping gait of his Belgariad books series derives from del Rey’s insistence that the trilogy Eddings wrote be marketed as five distinct novels. The outcome was a 60% increase in sales revenue from the same writing project but a narrative climax that only arrives a quarter of the way into the second book and another halfway into the fourth. Imagine, if you will, recutting the Lord of the Rings films this way. It would be even worse than what Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit. Let us also remember that the ubiquity of the trilogy form based on Tolkien’s magnum opus is likewise a publisher’s imposition based on market forces and the binding limitations of producing a codex commercially. The publisher and Reed College’s endowment fund certainly feel that del Rey made the correct choice because the money absolutely followed it like a hooked fish, but it does make some readers squint.

The prospect I wonder over is this meeting point between form, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and commercial forces of production. Hermeneutics of suspicion means that nagging feeling that a text means something other than what it says, like how we interpret (“hermeneutics”) everything our politicians say (“texts” if we’re generous…). This previous sentence is, of course, a telling rather than a showing, so some would say it’s an error in creative writing, but perhaps not you, my readers. I suspect that Anthony had the same instinct for his readers too. My New Critical suspicion wanders into the division between Anthony and Mendelsohn here. We expect a literary writer like Mendelsohn to mean more than his words are limited to. He exceeds language, or at least we hunt for clues hidden under the stones of his verb tense choices and vocabulary, just like my Homeric epithets earlier in this damp squib. So why not Anthony in his fantasy romp for juvenile readers with pimply 1980s hormones running wildly against our enlightened 2025 sense of gender parity? (Well, parity in name and tone just not in pay and security, because not all parities are equal…) Couldn’t my suspicions as a reader already be anticipated by a commercial author?

The answer was probably in the first Magic of Xanth book I read by Anthony, which wasn’t his first. The Source of Magic has the narrative voice step in and guide the reader by asking “Where was the ethical course?” (63–64), which shapes the reader’s focus. This is, under my professorial guise, an instance of free and indirect discourse, or a voice speaking without quotation marks or the tag “he said.” We readers tend to read this inside our minds as our own voice, so it’s naturally the voice to which we give the most credence and find most appealing.

In any case, this novel ends in an ethical dilemma with options weighed between three distinct hermeneutics of ethics: the deontological, the consequentialist, and virtue ethics. That is, does the young adventurer whose story is told for young boys find what is intrinsically good in itself, what is most good for the greatest number of people (shades of Star Trek’s rationalist futurism here), or does he act in a way that is true to his own inherent personal goodness? For the hero,

“I cannot let a living, feeling creature suffer because of my inaction. It doesn’t matter that the Demon would not free me, were our positions reversed; I am not a Demon, and shall not act like one. It only matters that a man does not stand by and allow a wrong he perceives to continue. Not when he can so readily correct it.” (Source 268)

When the young hero reflects on his integrity and its price, he wanders dangerously close to Socrates’ fate in Plato’s Phaedo and his contemplation of justice (which is itself a frame narrative tremblingly close to a ring). What must be surrendered to remain true?

“I would have respect for nothing, and love for nothing, if I did not respect and love justice. If I let personal attachments and desires prevail over my basic integrity of purpose, I would lose my claim to distinction as a moral creature. I must do what I think is right.” (Source 265)

It’s a tale sold by the pound to Walmart bargain hunters conscious of the shrinkflation hitting reading markets, yet we are left with Socrates’ willing self-sacrifice for a wrong judgment by his peers, because to evade justice when it’s wrong makes it impossible to seek justice when it is right. It’s a sentiment and source very much at home in Mendelsohn’s learned references but likely outselling it by miles and shaping hundreds of impressionable readers for every nodding approval of an academic who enjoys catching the clever gestures in Three Rings. My point isn’t to criticize Mendelsohn but rather to say our suspicious readings of Anthony should go beyond finding his flaws to also include where he too exceeds language and where his plans for his text mean more than what his words say.

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The farm boy came to the three modrybedd where they sat on the other side of a passage, a chancel marking the division between the room of books he could explore and the private space with an old table, three chairs, three mugs, and a single ashtray that was theirs alone. He deposited a codex of inestimable age on the rough, horizontal board that divided the two worlds, his and theirs. The book’s browned pages cracked at the edges, and he clasped it before setting it down, sensing the unreality of an entire world turned in a sideways dimension to fit between its covers. One of them groaned to her feet and stumped slowly to where he stood, looking with one eye slightly squinted at what he’d set down before her.

“Are you sure about that one?” He nodded.

She grimaced slightly. “Your books are safe. While you’re reading them you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe or even Bastian Balthazar Bux,” she said. “Afterwards you get to be a little boy again.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant and pointed at the ouroboros on the cover, “What does this mean?”

“You’d have to read it to find out,” she said, then added more forebodingly, “All sales are final.”

He nodded vigorously.

She licked one finger and turned the cover to the colophon, then tapped the clicking machine on her counter.

He rummaged six silver-coloured coins from his pocket and lay them on the board where she quickly wiped them off and into her pocket. It was a spell against taxation. With one foot slipping, she turned and stumped back to her table, the three of them going back to the blue haze enveloping them and the growling words they traded.

The boy turned and slipped out. He could sense a howling forest, a rockbiter, and the warp and weft of words woven into spells in a prose pile of great density. World without limit and story without ending. He had not yet realized that there is no “afterwards” to a story because every descent into narrative, every disguise we put on when we slip into a character and try on their costume of a world seen through their eyes, leaves us changed. We never get to be the same “little boy” again. We’re now a self who, mere moments ago, eluded a dragon, stilled an earthquake with a word, or whose silvery scar made a rushing sound inside the mind that allowed will and word to change a world. Just as we cannot step into the same stream twice because the waters have changed, so too is the self that steps made into something new.

His step out into the sun was like a return from an underworld, and he was changed, just like every moment he looked up from the dreaming world of a book.

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What we need, then, isn’t so much a loop as a braid, or rather a loop made up of braided rope. At one point, Mendelsohn says “It is as if there, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer were dreaming of Sebald…” (Three 102), a twenty-five century anachronism, and I can’t help but feel Anthony was dreaming Mendelsohn in a strange, uncanny way. How Precious Was That While appeared in 2001, the same year that Mendelsohn first visited Bolechow, the village of his family, to bear witness to the brutal murders of the Jewish community in the Holocaust. Mendlesohn’s book adores finding these synchronicities among his texts, and Anthony’s memoir recounts how he was being raised in a pacifist Quaker community in 1941, the same year as the horrors in Bolechow. Anthony was “in Spain as the German blitzkrieg swept south through France, stopping short of the border” (Bio of an Ogre 10), and he would also pause to remember how his own pacifism learned to be worldly, paralleling how the teachers in his Quaker school “wouldn’t have approved of the price of nonviolence had they taken the trouble to look into it. Reality can differ sharply from idealism” (How 29). It has Anthony “remembering” the future in Mendelsohn.

And ultimately, that is what my own short telling shows and now finally says: the braids here make the loops like bunny ears that knot together in the middle. That’s my modrybedd, the aunties of the Village Bookshop, whose gnarled and knotted grimaces, hair, and arthritic hands bind together Mendelsohn and Anthony with my farm boy self. The modrybedd’s books and coffee and acrid smokes were weaving a tapestry for young readers, passing along copies of both Fionavar and Castle Roogna, Shannara, the Mrin Codex, all weaving fate with a tangled skein. And why not refuse the too easy Gap Chasm between commercial property forces shaping fiction and the academic rituals of propriety and suspicion. Both demand loops, braids, and rings, and both work to serve the reader’s expectations. The truth that two readers differ is to be expected. As with allusions and Easter Eggs, we may find gold bullion hidden among the commercial ballast to avoid the eyes of tax collectors and editors.

For me, this all means that somewhere between the moment when Mendelsohn sees Homer dreaming of Sebald and my own reading journey, I could envision Anthony dreaming Mendelsohn… Reading is our slack tide in the river of time. In that moment, I had to admit that my own dreams may be the makings of the modrybedd dreamweavers looping a red thread guiding me to cross the highways of fantasy.

Works Cited

Anthony, Piers. How Precious Was That While. Macmillan, 2001.

———. Bio of an Ogre: The Autobiography of Piers Anthony to Age 50. Ace Books, 1989.

———. The Source of Magic. New York: Ballantine Book, 1997.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. U Virginia P, 2020.

Wise, Dennis Wilson. “Just Reading A Spell for Chameleon: An Appreciation with Caveats, and an Elegy.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 85–102.

1. Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020. ↩︎
2. Mendelsohn, Daniel. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. ↩︎
3. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ↩︎
4. Cavafy, C.P. The Complete Poems. Trans. Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ↩︎
5. Durrell, Lawrence. “A Cavafy Find.” From the Elephant’s Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings. Ed. James Gifford. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2015. pp. 123–128. ↩︎
6. It is worth noting that the University of Virginia was founded, built, and designed by Thomas Jefferson, and it embodies the American Founding Father’s perspective on the world. The Page-Barbour Lecturers were established in 1907 and invite the lecturer to speak to their area of expertise rather than a defined theme or disciplinary field. ↩︎
7. In Greek this is the turn toward the homeward journey, as in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus returns home to Ithaca. It is also the root of our English word “nostalgia,” which combines “home” from nostos with “pain” from algos. ↩︎
8. The Dell is a small lake on the grounds of the University of Virginia. The reference here compares Homer’s Odysseus travelling across the Mediterranean Sea to the author’s friend Charles L. Sligh returning to this small lake at his academic alma mater. ↩︎
9. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 13. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Creative writing seminars ubiquitously focus on the most teachable elements of writing, which is not the same thing as the most essential or the most innovative. Hence, braided forms are ubiquitously taught even though they are of varying efficacy with readers. “Less is more” works even though (as I tell students) sometimes more is more… ↩︎
12. A Chiasmus is typically an “X” pattern in writing where parts of the text mirror or link to each other in succession. “‘Tis pity ‘tis true, and ‘tis true ‘tis pity” has an ABBA shape. The chiasmus can follow this nesting pattern many, many times. It is also common in Biblical texts, such as “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” in Mark 2:27-28, which is again ABBA. Genesis is known for even more complex patterns, such as “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” 9:6 with a ABCCBA structure. See note 14. ↩︎
13. Wenham, Gordon J. “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 28, no. 3, 1978, pp. 336–348. ↩︎
14. Lund, Nils Wilhelm. Chiasmus in the New Testament: A Study in Formgeschichte. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. ↩︎
15. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 12. ↩︎
16. Van Otterlo, W.A.A. “Untersuchungen über Begriff, Anwen-dung und Entstehung der griechischen Ringkomposition.” Med-deelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, ns 7, no. 3, 1944, pp. 131–176. ↩︎
17. Fénelon, François. Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Paris, 1699. ↩︎
18. See Mendelsohn’s interview for the Harvard Book Store with James Wood as recorded on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ItDEVwwYu-g?t=2847. ↩︎
19. Douglas, Mary. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ↩︎
20. The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship was endowed in 1905 and began in 1923 to address religion from a humanitarian perspective. ↩︎
21. Reed College holds the David Eddings Papers in the Reed Library Special Collections. https://archivesspace.reed.edu/repositories/2/resources/45 ↩︎

(first published in the Quarantine Review 2021)

Near the southern tip of Alaska, in a tiny propeller plane jostled by turbulence, I flew back into Terrace. I was seated beside a crying baby. He cried like I cried four decades ago finding my first home for the first time—and now I was returning. It was a repetition, a once again to places already seen but unremembered. 

The flight in along the flow of the Skeena River is like looking over tangling hair rolling down between the broad shoulders of the valley, the river running under a bridge and me following it in as the channel of my life. I was eddying back to pass this place before flowing away. While flying in over the plateaus of the valley, the river became visible as forest gave way ground to farmland that becomes a wall of cedar once Terrace itself came into view. But the return was aslant and with a significant shock. Our pilot, the anxiety-inducing “Captain Ron,” did not steer our flying galley smoothly through the choppy crests and troughs, and the baby echoed through the cabin as we thundered abruptly down onto the runway, listing heavily to the right, then gripping the ground again to finally turn true and straight, every vertebrae chattering in my spine.

That first day back in Terrace was all for business. It was the work of “hello” and “hello again” with smiles and handshakes among old and new colleagues and friends. It centred on a small college at the top of a hill, overlooking the valley and the Skeena River, and each of us was intoxicated with the shockingly clean air, so free that each breath inward shivered down to the fingernails. The trees were in spring’s mad race, most dark green but others lighter along the edges or burrowing their way into dead stands with pale bark and quaking green leaves exhaling their verdant air everywhere with spring buds yawning awake. Still, work has to be done, and only minor adventures befall a band of bespectacled professors shuttling up that hill to meet in that college, some burly, bearded giants, others weasel-faced with quick curious eyes, but all bound up with the written word. 

I was thinking about the place though, not the people, and wondering how many visitors to Terrace come to see the town. How many who are travelling from a city to a town to consider the place itself and not its recreational enjoyments—the habitation of place and not its proximity to other pleasures? Our day’s work was all, at its heart, establishing trust across distances to give our students mobility. It’s a great risk to pass young lives to each other and to entrust their learning to new hands in different places, especially knowing that there are no homeward turns, no nostos, in those academic journeys, only going forever forward. By the time we cleared our agenda, the old friendships and camaraderie were restored. Out from the college at the end of the day, the sloping walk back to our group’s hotel showed the spilling valley overlooked by walls of mountains, thick with snowpack and the high plateau. As we gathered along the Yellowhead Highway after a confused stroll down, we eventually diverged in our separate streams. One group fell into a watering hole with only local beers—no ciders, wines, or spirits, and no food or fuss to dilute the buzz. Just beer and sausages akin to hotdogs in case of emergency levels of intoxication. I played it safe, breaking faith perhaps, and went with the crowd seeking a meal before most would scramble for a shuttle back to the airport in lieu of spending the night up in the north. But I wasn’t scrambling. I was staying on.

We had our table, broke bread, and remembered the same faces at different tables in Yellowknife, in Carcross, in Castlegar, in Kelowna. That was one part of my remembering while I tried to think through the aching nostalgia of washing up on a shore that wasn’t actually buried in memory. It’s a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me, not only for forty-four years of absence but for not even remembering my departure from it as my home. 

As an adopted child, there are many things unremembered. I remember my parents raising me, but I hadn’t known that I’d been held and visited by my birth mother before first flying to Terrace, and I hadn’t known it until twenty years after I’d met her. What is the nostos in this place then, an arrival back at an unremembered departure? Is there really such a thing to anyone, anywhere in the world? 

I’d come home to Terrace for the first time since I’d grown to the point I could start in the world. I was brought to a loving home here but I couldn’t remember the home itself. I hadn’t even seen the photographs of this home since I was as young as my own sons are now. My childhood memories, if I’m honest about them, are not images. They are all filtered through the prose of the books that I read, their words sieved my memories, thoughts thick with texture and glowing in their chain of language. And those books are few and deep-rooted as the landscape of my earliest origins. They are the tributaries flowing into me, swallowed whole into the basin of my thoughts and experiences and carried along my course.

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As the table broke up, most off to the airport and back to the city life as quick as possible, I said my goodnights and turned to the heart of Terrace in the opposite direction: the Skeena Mall. It was a spot I needed to find under the acropolis of these mountains. Walking in from the Nisga’a Highway and Kalum Lake Road by the steelworks is longer than it looks on the maps. Each road crossing was punctuated by the “sol mi re do” of the street crossing’s chimes that rang so unfamiliar to my ears, ears that are used to Vancouver’s minor third. Eventually reaching the mall, I passed the bright fuchsia sign for “Ardene” and the anchor store “Winners” and went in to see if this northern agora could tell me something about my childhood or what life might have waited here for me. Like every mall, teens sat in the aisles and seniors shuffled through the shops. An empty store space gave me good luck. The local high school repurposed it to tell the history of the Skeena Mall—not the story of the people of the Skeena River but a history of the shops and stalls that give their peculiar comforts in small towns. It had started by destroying the original church to clear the land—a flow of history from faith to capital, giving the nation state the slip by skipping ahead. That was in 1975, just as I left. I’d never been strolled, swaddled up against the cold, down the nave through the transept (the tobacconist) to the altar of this building. Whatever it might reveal to me about Terrace, it could tell me nothing about myself and offered no sacraments.

I exited beside the chancel by the pharmacy without offering a tithe and went North on Sparks Street to find my other planned visit: the bookstore, the closest thing to a sanctuary and votive. I already knew Misty River Books came from after my own departure, but I wanted to know what Terrace read. I wanted to know if the books that shaped my life would have been different had I stayed here. The descending “sol mi re do” chimed me across the streets up from City Hall until I reached the little window filled with books. I entered the one-room shop that smelled to me like a shrine to find it bursting with the written word. Almost immediately, I was staring down titles from an author whose brother I had taught and helped apply to law school (he got in, and his own fast flow ran away from another northern small town simmering in his homeward turns). I saw a new book of poetry from someone who would teach that summer, and poetry in small shops is always a gift. There were so many unexpected and familiar faces, all welcoming me home. This was a devotional space, a votive to mark a form of salvation. I let my hands slip along the smooth then textured spines. I found some small gifts for my sons, and as it was, the Misty River had a novel for evening story-time before bed. It was a mystery about young boys on the shores of Harrison Lake, a part of my own childhood that I did remember, and I picked it up immediately. 

But as I turned, I met my surprise. I had spent most of my adolescence and teen years reading and rereading a handful of novels that the used bookstore of my small town in the Fraser Valley made available. They were all here. Every single one. And they filled a whole shelf. 

I was a boy again on Faldor’s Farm with the rich smells of a kitchen and a childhood idyll of comfort and love and safety and home. I might not remember being adopted, but somehow those books of a laughing, loving acceptance that could fill any child’s heart as the perfect atonement for anything and everything came racing back. That they were not only here but here in full seemed unexpectedly reassuring. I knew now that my relationship to those books was more complex. The dry voice whispering in some corner of my mind knew it too, and the books’ atonements, their confessions and penance to some other child of Omelas a decade before me, were already kindled. Our human hearts, our sins and our sorrows are entangled with everything in the slim stream of a life that unfolds and flows like a skein or a river overflowing its banks and never in the same pathway for another. These were the books I was already reading for my sons at home despite knowing the secret shame they confessed for another adopted boy in another adopted home beside another eddying river. I asked the owner about the Harrison Lake mystery. “Oh yes, it’s great fun for reading out loud. They’d like it.” I noticed too the full shelf of my childhood nostalgia. “I always keep them in stock. I think everyone grew up reading those.” So I bought my worlds of words for my sons and exited into the dimming early night of verdant and violet horizons.

❦ ❦ ❦

By the time I reached my hotel, the sun was behind the hills. I smelled dusty with sweat, and my legs and feet were warm with the welcome ache of doing what they were made for. I went up to my room, pulled out my notebook, opened my window to the shocking clarity of the night air with its crust of green scents from the forest world around me, and started to make plans for the morning hours I’d have before flying home. Time then to walk and time now to write.

I thought, nostalgia may be our familiar, peculiar homing pain, but I’ve no idea when the moment of nostos actually arrived in my life. I can date my return to Terrace in a notebook, but that’s not what I meant. Not the arrival, but that singular moment of turning back toward home. 

There has never been a point at which the agon is done, the work set down, and the life’s rudder turned backward, and maybe that’s the point—I know for a certainty that I was not, at the moment of arrival here, in any way who I had been when I left, even if that flow from past to present was a continuous clear stream, swift-flowing and many-channelled. 

It’s foolish to imagine it this way though, because I could never possibly navigate past the rapids. Who can? The eddying of nostalgia in time is really at best a momentary slack tide or stasis, a yawning, momentary mindfulness opening in Spring. The Skeena has no tidal stream here, and neither does life circle back on itself as seasons repeat. They’re born, not born again.

As I made these jottings, my phone buzzed beside me with an audio message. The wail of a banshee howling for all it could never have and all it had ever lost came through. My youngest son missed me, his world was empty, and I was supposed to be there to read the adventures I’d just seen on the banks of Misty River. What would happen to Garion? Would Old Wolf protect him? Who was trying to steal him away from his home? 

My heart was tripping over itself. I called and was immediately handed over to the tiny wailing voice calling across the distance. He was tired. He needed to know if the story was safe. He wanted to go to a carnival when I came home. He wanted to go right now. And like some consequentialist calculation around a child of Omelas, I wondered how to calculate the greater good of my being away from family. Should I have planned on an early ending like everyone else? Why was I stepping outside of life for this momentary slack tide?

I calmed the crying voice down, told him I loved him forever and always, and I tried to describe just how green and clean the world around me was and how much I wanted to show it to him. The crying calmed and quickly made its sudden turn to the snuffling snoring. I said my goodnights to unhearing ears and went back to my plans. My parents sent a message too, in response to my own call. They wrote to confirm that after I’d stayed as a tiny preemie with my birth mother in hospital until my lungs worked well enough, they had brought me back here to the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue. 

That was my first home, remembered only through ill-lit and fading photographs of my parents looking like plaid-clad hippies. Nostos. Algos. I had the address for Faldor’s Farm. It was the half-remembered dreamlike wound, the traumof childhood. And tomorrow I would wake to it. I fell into the fitful dreaming sleep that comes in a place of unfamiliar scents and sounds, like the echo of train horns resounding from mountainsides unheard for decades and the rich foliate chlorophyll of a green world on all sides. There was a woman with a white lock in her black hair, my sons calling for me to be home and one wailing against my absences—there was also another tiny adopted child hollowed out for the love that is so hard to find in rough rural towns, and me tossing through the night restlessly, thinking of a farm and a ringing smithy and laughing through an idyll of childhood I’d read as a gift, folding it into the bed of my life’s stream.

What need to atone drove an author to write such books for the young? What drove me to read them? He’d gone to jail for it. I went to college. But was the engine behind it so different?

❦ ❦ ❦

I rose early the next morning. I’d left my window and blinds open to have the chill air and early sunlight to drive me from bed. I showered, packed, pulled on my hoodie against the cold, and went downstairs to pluck a few hard-boiled eggs from the breakfast set as they were just being put out, still warm, and a large cup of coffee. I put the eggs and a napkin in the front pocket of my pull-over where they would keep my hands snug against the cool. I started off out the doors onto the Highway of Tears and then turned onto the Nisga’a Highway.

The road wrapped round from the steelworks and ran uphill with a narrow soft bed on the side of gravel and the ground-down softness of shed cedar and pine washed to the sides in the winter’s thaw. It was muffled and soft underfoot, nearly grainy, and I walked swiftly under the trees, rising past rousing neighbours with barking dogs and the sun over tall grass meadows. The shade of the sun over the Kitsumgallum cemetery for settlers at the top of the hill gave way as everything opened into a high and flat plateau. An old man with rope for a belt walked past slowly on the other side of the road, and I offered my “morning” to him, met by a nod, though I had my earphones in to listen to a lecture by two friends on ethics, the banality of evil, and a fantasy story whose child was smouldering into my thoughts from some other time. I was blessed by loving parents, and also a loving birth mother who could give me up to their love. I had been too lucky. I ate my hard-boiled eggs, pitched the shells into the ditch with their short sulfur smell, and revelled in the freedom of a choice made to bring me to meet this world, to taste its clean air, and to walk my way through it.

With the sun on me, the coat of sweat’s salt and oil on my forehead, and a thin and cool bead of perspiration running down the back of my neck, I reached the crossroads. Here on the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue, I had to see the past as an anchor into the future. The promises and failures, the flow of guilt driving unexpected atonements, the forgotten roots still growing, and the past as some dark basement to the present beside the upward-climbing path of the future. I reached the crossroad of my earliest life and my first home. 

It was a void. 

On the west side, the north and south by the church had homes too new and too unlike mine in the faded photographs to be connected. These were from later than me. To the east was an empty stand of forest in the north and the impossible to the south. My home was not there. 

The first home in which my swaddling clothes were warmed in the oven, one button once too hot burned itself in to mark me for life, the silver scar carried all the way out into the world and now brought all the way back home again. The snows buried the roof my father would dig out, wild dog packs passed outside, and the poorly lit photographs of my childhood held firm roots. It was not there. 

There was only the Waap Sa’mn House of the college, the same campus I had seen the day before to find pathways for students to move through their studies seamlessly. It was the Birch House of the campus, and the Celtic sense in me called out to new beginnings, but the settler hesitation I carry was unsure how to read the Sa’mn here on a site not my own and with my roots floating, even racing down the stream of the misty river to be washed away. 

My childhood home was torn down to make land for the campus that was founded the year after I left. My shallow roots became a college. 

I stood dumb and stilled. I had been here only a day before to say that students from anywhere are owed a pathway to anywhere else. Yet my own feet were calling to a rootedness not my own and a recognition that the cosmopolitan mobility that made my life’s riverbed possible might itself be a trauma to another. 

I thought back to that small bookstore, itself filled up with books written as atonements for the harms done to a child like me, atonements every day repeated and everyday incomplete. And I could only think of my tremendous gift, to be on that precipice of impasse and able to look into it with love for Terrace, thinking less of my debts to the past and a history that formed me and more to the needs of my future that called, wailing in discontent over my absence, and my service to a debt from my own past that forgot my debt to the future. I took my photographs and thought of how I would read my son those books from my own childhood that he had come to love, and how I would tell myself something about the child toward whom those books were an act of atonement. In that moment of another beginning facing the birch, I saw the future as a departure outward that I could never fulfill but also a possibility to give this beginning place a portentous purpose, a direction, and a pathway always uphill to be run through, laughing.

My walk back in a long circle was tiring, and my trip to the airport shortly after was too brief to recall with the friends who were also stragglers. But as I flew out of Terrace later that morning with propellers churning, I had no aching pain of home. It was only the strange anagnorisis that the future of others needed my presence and not my past, and the same from the stories I was telling them—stories whose atonement may have driven their telling but whose futures would drive my sons with their aching wish for love. 

I was eddying back again in the stream before flowing and resuming the current. In that moment looking down from the airplane shaking with the buzzing thrum of propellers, I lost nostalgia to the future after the return itself. The lost third Nostoi is always yet to be written.

Modernist Monsters

I’ve made a terrible mistake… As a scholar of modernist literature, the idea of reading monsters isn’t surprising. We accustom ourselves to knowing the great figures of our academic discipline can also be monsters. Some brilliant scholars play coy about Ezra Pound’s fascism and awareness of the atrocities of Nazi concentration camps and genocide, but I believe Matthew Feldman when he says the typewriters give up the goods. We are used to asking these difficult questions of T.S. Eliot’s antisemitism; Orwell’s misogyny; Woolf’s racism (Tolkien’s too, for that matter); or just about everything about Wyndham Lewis.

But I moved away from modernism in A Modernist Fantasy, or rather I moved modernism itself to look at those who shifted from it to the popular pulp. This was partly to include or even emphasize those who led normal and tedious lives, teaching modernist literature and writing mainstream entertainments for the young, or the radical poets who turned to children’s adventure novels.

Then I discovered I was still reading monsters.

Worse, I felt sympathy and had mis-interpreted the fragmented archive. It transforms one entire body of not-quite-modernist works. My terrible mistake, I think, reflects a common quandary in our approach to the modernist archive in relation to the art, and in relation to the artist. I want to argue that the individual talent is not like a catalyst – it is profoundly altered by the creation of art, and that change (if not the personality) lingers on in the creative work itself. But that is a hermeneutics of engagement, not one of suspicion… For that I need an example.

The Popular Monster

David Eddings was a popular, very popular, fantasy novelist. It also looks like he served a one-year jail term for child abuse and lost his tenured professorship at what is now Black Hills State University before writing fantasy novels that shaped my childhood. As I note in A Modernist Fantasy and “A Frightful Hobgoblin Stalks Through Modernism,” he was also an accomplished professor teaching modernist literature. His lecture notes are not simply capable, they are even by today’s standards, pretty good. And this made me think again about how I approach, in my profession, those other earlier modernist monsters we hold up as a canon.

Eddings married Judith Lee Schall, and they eventually settled in Spearfish, South Dakota when he took up a faculty position teaching English literature at Black Hills State College[1]. They then adopted a son, Scott David Eddings,[2] and later a daughter, Kathy. In January, 1970, they were arrested at their home on charges of child abuse in relation to their son.[3] Eddings’ lawyers moved for a separate trial from his wife, as well as separate counsel. This was only granted at his own expense, $50 a month.[4] During the trial, they lost custody of both children[5] and eventually agreed to a plea of misdemeanor child abuse with one year in jail, and an agreed statement of fact that “between the fall of 1966 and Jan. 22 1970, on dates other than those included…, on regular or separate occasions as part of a general scheme, [they] did consistently willfully and unlawfully cruelly punish and neglect a child under the age of 14, namely Scott David.”[6]

He planned to divorce his wife after the jail term and sought advice from his lawyers for it: sue for alienation of marital affections.[7] His later letters to his father also depict her as wildly tempered and capable of real violence.[8] In any case, they did not divorce. Their marriage survived, though she changed her name to Leigh Eddings, and he was already using this new spelling of her middle name before her jail term ended. He did not change his name, but he did say he left his tenured faculty position over a pay dispute… Surprisingly, his department chair and the college President both backed him up in glowing letters of reference[9] written after they had already terminated his position and the stories were widespread in the news – in other words, it wasn’t just to get rid of him. How we interpret all of this is, however, inherently speculative.

I am compelled to tell this story not to gossip about the dead or to knock down some readers’ (or just my own) brass idols but because the Wikipedia editor censored it. If I take seriously that editor’s concern that there could be many people with the initials D. and L. Eddings in the USA, the answer is that it would seem “David Carroll Eddings” and “Judith Lee Eddings” in Spearfish, as tenured literature faculty and wife at Black Hills State College, whose archives include a calendar countdown for the same jail dates with the “Good Time” exit date circled[10], well, that lowers the odds of mistaken identity…

Reading Monsters: Biography, Affect, & Critique

But what does this mean? Is there a difference in their degrees of culpability? Are the clearly sensationalistic early newspaper reports exaggerated? (they begin with a torture dungeon but grow significantly tamer over time)[11] None of that can be known now – the couple agreed to a statement of fact in the plea, so there is no final judge’s determination or testimony based on an expert assessment of the evidence. Their defense lawyers argued the sensationalism of the news coverage had already punished them, and they included for sentencing what would have been expert testimony that they were not “the malicious sort”[12], but the extent of their individual culpability and the extent of their crimes is a closed history now.

Does this mean we should we never read Eddings? Should we never read Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Lewis, and so forth? Should publishers donate the profits to charity?

This is where I learned a good deal from Eddings’ popular pulp. His novels are changed utterly with this biographical knowledge, but the change is one of affect and feeling not interpretation. Rather than accepting the death of the author, I want to adopt some of the postures of postcritique to ask about how we as readers respond. Eddings returned to writing while in jail, which led to his first published novel, High Hunt. He later suggested he co-authored it with his wife, but this wasn’t possible. He completed the first draft in March 1971 while they were both in different jails, about half-way through their terms.[13] The novel opens with his own abusive relationship with his father, where being hit as a child is followed by him showing affection and asking his father for a story. The abuse bound up with love is telling. This self-exploration during his jail term is plainly the driving motivation of the highly autobiographical novel.[14]

That modest success was then followed by striking gold in the 1980s fantasy market. Eddings’ Belgariad novels started in 1982 and earned millions – tens of millions during his fantasy writing career. Those books are also symptomatic. They depict an idyllic childhood, serenely innocent children, a woman like his wife who experiences her happiest moments in life while gently holding a toddler, there’s a direct juxtaposition of his own alter-ego in the books and an abuser, and a failed marriage saved by the birth of a son, and the tremendous gentleness this awakens in his parents. In short, I now read Eddings’ later fantasy novels as an impossible attempt at atonement, a desperately failed wish put to paper, and a tortuously painful digging out of his and his wife’s shame.[15] As a modernist scholar, this changes nothing about how I interpret the books or recognize their extensive allusions to literary texts or pro-labour politics. It is a change of affect not interpretation.

I was in the middle of re-reading those novels with my sons when the extent of my terrible mistake first became clear. But we’re still reading them… They are populated with loving families, beautiful childhoods, perfectly innocent toddlers – the readerly affect, the feeling I have in response to these novels now, is one of pity and anguish. You see, I am also an adopted son… I feel it most strongly when the novels show moments of domestic bliss or comfortable companionship. They reveal how an abuser confronted his own position in intergenerational violence and abuse, his culpability, what he lost and how fully it was gone, then somehow turned that pain into something different – but not without first bleeding into the page, and not without me thinking about their adopted son. Thinking of how differently I might feel if my own story had been more the monster than the dream.[16] That fantasy became a thing of comfort for many young readers. I can hardly imagine what it meant for his wife, Leigh, to read such books offering hard truths about herself, themselves, and their culpability. And my sons love it like a warm blanket for a cold night.

Rather than a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” I’d like to follow postcritique’s attention to affect. Rather than the death of the author, which would here be a way of killing off the monsters to keep only their hoard of treasures, I wonder how looking the monster full in the eyes may instead awaken another possibility. I don’t have that with Pound, but surely the Pisan Cantos have a richness when we realize the yawning profundity of Pound’s guilt. Eliot’s Prufrock can hardly hide as some product of a catalyst when we see Old Tom’s letters and the inhibited sense of connection those foibles spawn. But while we may cringe over how Eliot treated his first love, cannot the failure of that treatment also open to us a greater sense of feeling for Prufrock? If I can find something that brings my children great comfort when it’s read to them, is that in some sense a recognition of an attempt to atone?

What Now?

Some people suggest it’s a symptom of political correctness gone wrong when we hold the creative work responsible for the crimes of its creator. The sins of the father and all… I think that’s a dodge. The work can’t be read without the crime, but it can go different ways. I can’t read an Anne Perry novel without thinking of it… In epic fantasy, the love triangle at the heart of The Mists of Avalon, a book vital to so many, is forever perverted into abuse… But revulsion isn’t the only affect. There are also pity and pain, even while being careful not to centre the experiences of the abuser. In particular, I think anguish is a potent entry to discussing the affect of a creative work.

When Eddings died, he bequeathed a gift in Leigh’s name to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver of $10 million for pediatric asthma treatment and research, and bequeathed an $18 million gift to Reed College for an endowed professorship in English and need-based scholarships for students of limited means. Perhaps the monster grew, by writing, to comprehend how irrevocably it had made a terrible mistake…

Notes

[1] Eddings, David. Teaching. Box 7, Folders 15–20. David Carroll Eddings Papers. Special Collections & Archives, Reed College Library, Portland, OR. 2 August 2016.

[2] “Mr. And Mrs. David Eddings Adopt First Child, Scott David,” Queen City Mail (Spearfish, South Dakota), 10 March 1966, p. 5.

[3] “Witnesses Tell of ‘Child Abuse’,” Black Hills Weekly (Deadwood, South Dakota), 11 February 1970, p. 1, 3.

[4] “Couple Granted Separate Trials In Spearfish Child Abuse Case.” Deadwood Pioneer Times, 2 May 1970, p. 1.

[5] “Court Denies Petition for Child Custody,” Rapid City Journal (Rapid City, South Dakota), 16 May 1970, p. 2. “Appeal Trial Set In Child Custody,” Black Hills Weekly, 24 February 1971, p. 3. “Hills Couple Denied Custody,” Black Hills Weekly (Deadwood, South Dakota), 23 June 1971, p. 4.

[6] “Pair Sentence to Year in Jail on Child Abuse.” Rapid City Journal, 15 September 1970, pp. 1, 2.

[7] Eddings, David. Notes. Circa 1971. Box 7, Folder 8. David Carroll Eddings Papers. Special Collections & Archives, Reed College Library, Portland, OR. 2 August 2016.

[8] Eddings, David. Letter to George Eddings. Circa 1993. Box 8, Folder 12. David Carroll Eddings Papers.

[9] Eddings, David. University of Washington – Catalog, Correspondence, Records. 20 March 1970. Box 7, Folder 21. David Carroll Eddings Papers. Special Collections & Archives, Reed College Library, Portland, OR. 2 August 2016.

[10] Eddings, David. Notes.

[11] “Eddings Couple Faces Sentencing on Child Abuse,” Rapid City Journal, 15 August 1970, p. 2. Even in my personal experience, newspaper accounts (especially those of small towns) can embellish a lot – the first story featuring me in the early 1990s to promote a concert opened with a romantic (and impossible) stroll through venues and locations. I didn’t complain because it helped, but it also awakened a wariness I’ve carried ever since.

[12] “Pair Sentence to Year in Jail on Child Abuse.” Rapid City Journal, 15 September 1970, pp. 1, 2.

[13] Eddings, David. Notes.

[14] The novel parallels Eddings’ life in many respects. The break-up of his engagement with his college sweetheart while drafted and serving in Germany, his return to Tacoma, WA, his relationship with his brother and father, all play a clear role in the novel as well, also including his struggles with alcoholism.

[15] Many scenes across the novel series are altered by this knowledge. The adoption of the orphaned child Errand by Polgara and Durnik, the protagonist’s peaceful and idyllic childhood, Ctuchik as abuser, the healing of Barak and Meril’s marriage by the birth of their son (and the gentleness it awakens), and many specific passages about children, toddlers, and the joy and tenderness they awaken in the character suggest a very different relationship between author and work.

[16] I have written about this through creative non-fiction. In a narrative form, “Terrace Nostoi” combines my own return to my first adoptive home just after learning about Eddings’ jail term, finding his books well-stocked in that small-town bookshop, and thinking about how my own life could have been very different.

Lawrence Durrell in the OED

Lawrence Durrell was an author for readers of dictionaries par excellence. And while that may seem peculiar praise, it also shapes one way of reading the man. Dictionaries have an indexical nature, and the most labour intensive word for a reader is “See…” Durrell tells us he structures his books as siblings not sequels (a recuperation or excavation of time rather than progress) – surely these siblings are also cousins to that word ‘see…’ Durrell, see also Henry Miller, see also Elizabeth Smart, see also Anarchism, see also Colonialism, see also Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, see also Anglo-Indian. Durrell, see also Durrellian.

Of the 264 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that currently draw on Durrell for quotations, my favourite is ‘Ouspenskyist’. The word means ‘A follower of the Russian mystical philosopher Ouspensky or of his ideas’, and the OED’s quotation is from the novel Balthazar, the second volume of Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. For the OED, this is currently the first source for the word – no preceding (or subsequent) use appears in the wild. In a sense, then, ‘Ouspenskyist’ was only defined retrospectively, which reminds us that Durrell’s Quartet has been a particularly fertile source of quotations for logophiles, and hence an attractive ‘word object’ for the same subspecies of humanity.

But there’s a theme in this as well. The full quotation, which is necessarily abridged in the entry, reads ‘Alexandria is a city of sects – and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists…’ In typical Durrellian fashion, the word sits provocatively amidst unlikely companions with the esoteric, the occult, the Pulitzer Prize winning, and lastly conservative Protestantism. And none are uniquely Alexandrian.

Overlooked Bestseller

These conflicting juxtapositions are perhaps the most memorable element of Durrell’s literary style and also the source of his appeal to OED contributors for quotations. Such sharp contrasts were also a part of the author himself, who remains an oxymoronically overlooked bestseller. Durrell continues to out-sell most of his literary contemporaries, at least those with literary pretensions, and his works have developed an extensive body of scholarship in literary studies. Yet he remains peculiarly outside the literary establishment and almost utterly absent from literary anthologies.

While Faber & Faber had financial success with Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in the 1950s, only one of those texts became a mainstay of the classroom (reaching generation after generation). Durrell remains a series of complex contrasts, and that can make his works both rewarding and a challenge.

Durrell as Homonym

In addition to his doppelgänger brother, Gerald Durrell, we find in Durrell a double. We have the Durrell of the Second World War era who may have been a government agent yet published in the anarchist press and befriended pacifists. There’s Durrell who offered a nostalgic aroma of empire without any meaningful Arab characters in his 1957 Alexandrian novel Justine (notably a vision sold to a post-Suez British reading public). This is the same man who protected the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery from American intelligence and paid his way when he couldn’t make rent. In that same forgotten moment Durrell supported the translation of Cossery’s first novel Men God Forgot, a manuscript he sent from Egypt to his friend Henry Miller in California for publication in the anarchist Circle Editions imprint – the same book enjoyed support from Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan in their radical San Francisco reading circle. Yet Bitter Lemons, also from 1957, presents Durrell in his working capacity for the British government in Cyprus during Enosis, a man who had been in Argentina under Perón and Yugoslavia during Tito’s break with the Cominform. An anarchistic government man – a political liaison taking sanctuary in personal landscapes.

These politics are nowhere more evident than in his Revolt of Aphrodite. This 1968 and 1970 book set made Durrell’s readers of colonial eroticism sad. It mocks sexuality in the modern industrial world and relentlessly excoriates the lateral spread of corporatism into culture itself. The books were more Marcusian critique than Marijuana culture, and those who had imagined themselves in libidinal Alexandria were not keen on the contrast. However, even here the juxtapositions are keen. For ‘personal’, the OED offers a Durrell quotation for the plural form of the noun: ‘He had invented what he called the mnemon which he insisted was a literary form… Times Personals of a slightly surrealist tinge’. The cutting edge of the juxtaposition here is the creeping growth of multinational capital into intimate human vulnerabilities through the mundanity of advertising – hence the revolt is pranksterism not uprising.

The complexities of this conflictual figure pour out in his prose. In one mood, the OED offers the following loquacious quotation from Durrell’s Justine for ‘palpitation’: ‘In autumn the female bays turn to uneasy phosphorus and after the long chafing days of dust one feels the first palpitations of the autumn, like the wings of a butterfly fluttering to unwrap themselves.’ In contrast, the poet attending to his language more tersely tells his reader in ‘Green Man’, ‘Four small nouns I put to pasture.’ The poem’s simplicity and attention to itself goes through the emotional grammar of loss that the poet surely felt in Greece in 1940 after the outbreak of war. He painfully realizes ‘the nouns are back in the bottle’ and ends with the simplicity of tense shifts, ‘I ache and she is warm, was warm, is warm.’ These two homonyms of ‘Durrell’ juxtapose keenly.

Basic English

This movement between the baroque and colloquial should come as no surprise for a poet who experimented as a language tutor with Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English and its 850-word vocabulary. Despite providing the OED with examples for both ‘pegamoid’ and ‘pithecanthropoid’, Durrell’s poetic voice could limit itself to 850 words. Yet his ‘Two Poems in Basic English’ still provoke, for ‘This earth a dictionary is / To the root and growth of seeing’ and also more sharply ‘But ideas and language do not go.’ This last provokes us by reveling in the complexities of a basic vocabulary versus an aesthetic that resists clear definitions. In a way, we’re back to the anarchist government man… A dictionary with ambiguous definitions.

I hope this kind of conflict brings readers back to Durrell on his anniversary, though many readers have never left and new readers continuously arrive. It’s a productive conflict. By jarring us between juxtapositions, indexical page flipping, and purposeful prolixity, Durrell makes us read dictionaries like novels: as a fecund richness of language ordered by an index. In the same moment, we begin to read novels like dictionaries: an index fecundated by linguistic richness. See also ‘polysemy’.

Image by: Yani papadimos (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog posting first appeared in Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, 7 November 2013. (Access via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170807110825/http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/a-durrellian-dictionary/)

Emerging out the other side of a book project might be how I prepare for the empty nest syndrome. Books aren’t children, but they dwell with one’s family for years, and then suddenly one day they have to go out into the world, never to be cajoled or coaxed into growth again. I’m calling this the empty desk syndrome, except it’s ridiculous – I’m as buried under as ever. More than ever, to be honest. In any case, I’ve done three big book projects with two tiny sons tearing the paper apart, and I have two more drafts completed that they’re itching to pull to pieces every time I slide the springback binder off my desk… The trick is that I increasingly see them both as future readers of the words I’m writing. Somewhere off in the receding future, they co-exist with cracking spines rather than scrawling crayons. And that makes me ask how I re-read the things I read while young.

I opened A Modernist Fantasy by pointing to the books from my childhood. I would have never written that kind of book if my neighbour Julie hadn’t passed a copy of Pamela Dean’s fantasy novel The Secret Country over the fence during the summer of 1985. It might not seem like a network or coterie, but I’m calling it close enough. I was as mystified by the novel as I was by its magical cover with a unicorn and castle. So while the moment of 1980s fantasy fiction that nurtured my love of reading wasn’t the focus of my own project (I looked earlier, I looked to the more radical), it was the impulse. It set me on that path and urged me to ask questions that led to it. It also demanded that the cultural studies part of my mind see these books in two ways: (1) as “books that real people actually read” and hence have a social history of importance, and (2) as books playfully aware of the complexities of literary hobby horses and the formal experimentation of the twentieth century. I could look to Dean’s allusion-packed Tam Lin as well as David Eddings’s silly emperor watching model war games. Of course, those models are an allusion to Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy. After all, Eddings had lecture notes on Sterne in his archives, but that also changed how I would read the maps and images tucked into Eddings’s novel against the emblem of Sterne’s work.

Now I’m reading those books from my childhood again and maybe being cajoled by them into writing a new project or perhaps just learning to simply be a reader for a while. That’s an unreasonable thing for an academic: to read without the critical faculty churning like a discontent or nervous foot. I knew it wouldn’t happen, and that’s what made me curious.

The books that first lured me to read under the covers, hide with a flashlight, or bike off past farm fields to read under the trees in the park were all from around the same period, roughly 1977–87. It’s a strange moment in fantasy as a genre too. I was only three years old when fantasy surpassed science fiction in sales, and that year is still lamented by foundational critics in the SF field as the death of western civilization (I’m pointing at Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin). That strange cluster of the Eighties, or really 1977–90, is puzzling. The tendency, deriving from Jameson and Suvin, is to look at those books as reactionary nostalgia, and that’s precisely what I set out to disprove about the genre in A Modernist Fantasy, but it’s a harder argument to make about that 1980s moment that beguiled me as a young reader.

In 1977, the publication of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion shook bestseller lists (and set Guy Gavriel Kay off toward his 80s fantasy trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry). The same year saw the start of Piers Anthony‘s still (r/p)unning Xanth series with A Spell for Chameleon, Stephen R. Donaldson‘s also-still-running Chronicles of Thomas Covenant with Lord Foul’s Bane, and Terry Brooks‘s also-also-still-running Shannara with The Sword of Shannara. It’s also the same year as Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the first AD&D. The problem for me is why this shift happened in 1977 with these four (or six) books?

In a sense, 1977 wasn’t really a change. Ursula K. Le Guin began her Earthsea series in 1968 with A Wizard of Earthsea (or four years earlier with a short story), Mary Stewart‘s Arthurian series started in 1970 with The Crystal Cave, and Katherine Kurtz‘s Deryni Rising in the same year started her own series. The change, really, seems to be a shift from female to male writers… But there’s also a change in money – the naturalization of commercial exchange (buying ale in a tavern and jingling a purse of filthy lucre) arrives in 1977 in a way we don’t see earlier, especially not in Tolkien. And maybe this is really a better complaint to use by turning to Jameson and Suvin, no matter how hard I eschewed them for A Modernist Fantasy.

1980s fantasy seems deep set in rising neoliberalism. Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the book that launched a thousand novels, opens with that D&D tavern and Tika Waylan deep in a Protestant work ethic that would find her interpellated perfectly in a McDonald’s today. The Sword of Shannara opens with Flick as a traveling salesman of a sort. Eddings has blood red coins that tilt economies with a flood of capital. The other giant series, Forgotten Realms, turns instead to race with a thinly veiled finger pointed to American racism in The Crystal Shard, yet each book in its first trilogy seems to really mean class and circles around recovering a treasure, and always homesick for the Icewind Dale that exists only to exploit the sale of fish whose bones are ivory. Charles de Lint‘s Moonheart and depictions of indigenous peoples seems steeped in the same identity politics of neoliberalism. The naturalization of choice as an expression of capitalist exchange, the production of race as a condition of capitalism, and freedom as the freedom to own and exchange appear to be deep set. For this reason, I feel sure Friedrich Hayek would have loved Dragonlance.

But what does this mean? I certainly read these books in my youth with a very different state of mind, but I was at least of the moment of their production. My students read (and still read) them too, but they were born in a different century and, most often, on a different continent. I first went back to re-read Eddings at the prompting of one of my students from Zimbabwe who grew up reading him too, but can we be said to have read the same books? Is it unfair of me to switch tracks and suddenly historicize fantasy after 1977? Could I do anything else? There’s an element of chance to wandering into a project not really knowing what, if anything, one might find – at what point in a scholarly career can any of us simply enjoy the luxury of that role of the dice?

The fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in something new as well. If fantasy was uniquely receptive to the economic and political climate of the 1980s, absorbing Thatcher and Reagan ideologically even while espousing a social and cultural liberalism, the genre took to the unifying Germany and post-Soviet world almost immediately and changed again. An explicitly Randian libertarianism appears in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series (make no confusion here with Le Guin’s and Moorcock’s anarchism). There’s more than a little pleasure to be taken in knowing Goodkind’s description of capitalist competition through trees has been debunked in the wood-wide-web… (this is my personal schadenfreude). Robert Jordan‘s Wheel of Time is deep set in concerns of power and domination, and the ongoing sprawling realpolitik of George R.R. Martin‘s Song of Fire & Ice seems ready to call out the climactic cataclysm we call the unspoken condition of late capitalism. In any case, the hopeful pluralism of the 1980s had gone, even if that pluralism had been bought rather that conjured.

The Battle for Seattle in the 1999 WTO protests in turn opened to something new in urban fantasy. Identity politics might, in the kind of analysis Jameson urges us toward, be understood as neoliberalism’s greatest reification, but the impulse behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes the personal political in a seemingly different way. It endorses a sense of identity distinct from that which the materialist discourses of neoliberalism imply. Nancy Fraser would not approve… If we accept that “claims for social justice seem to divide into two types: claims for the redistribution of resources and claims for the recognition of cultural difference,” then fantasy of the naughts aims for recognizing cultural difference. Maybe it makes a challenge at the beating heart of our critical disputes today. And in this difference we find Nicole Peeler‘s Trueniverse, Margaret Killjoy‘s Danielle Cain, Saladin Ahmed‘s Throne of the Crescent Moon, Jes Battis‘s OSI, and Daniel Heath Justice‘s Way of Thorn & Thunder trilogy. Reactionary interpellations of the consuming subject as an exotic product, or a radical subversion?

But seriously, anyone who calls fantasy apolitical has gotta take a closer look. And with that, my empty desk is about to collapse under new weights.

It all started in another book… A prequel. After an archival project retracing global networks of late modernist radical poetry groups in the Second World War, I found several poets turned to popular pulp. And I don’t mean Day-Lewis’ punning mysteries as Nicholas Blake – more like the New Apocalypse’s Henry Treece, Ruthven Todd, or Alex Comfort. They wrote fantasy novels with magic and swords, or for Todd: cats in space. The post-war years were a time of need, and poetry (especially radical) never pays its bills. So, after picking up its tab and archival traces in Personal Modernisms, I wanted to relax with pulp. I wanted simplicity.

That’s how I found myself in the basement of the Reed College Library’s Special Collections in Portland – it was even a road trip: a journey, a quest. A “Reedie,” David Eddings, later became one of the best-selling fantasy authors of the twentieth century, as far from modernism and into pulp as possible. I’d become curious after giving my little sister a set of his books, at the same age I was given them when they first appeared in the 1980s. So in Portland with Eddings’ papers in hand, ostensibly a splurge during research on Robert Graves and the Beats, I discovered an irruption of the marvellous. Eddings had been a tenured professor of English literature before quitting the profession. Worse still, he’d taught Modernism! I held his lecture notes from three courses on modernist English and American literature. When his quest narrative gave cheeky dialogue between an ancient wizard and a young boy (the target audience), he set free choice and determinism in conflict amidst a magical prophecy by asking why two and two make four.

“Simple things are always the hardest to explain.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Garion retorted, a bit irritably.

“Oh?” Wolf looked at him with amusement. “Let me ask you a simple question, then? What’s two and two?”

“Four,” Garion replied promptly.

“Why?”

Was he really thinking of “two and two make four” as the expression of determinism in Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground? Well, he had lecture notes on it… He identifies Dostoyevsky as the prototype of the sociological novel in all of his modern writing courses, pointing to The Idiot and the underground man specifically. Even his lengthy (and very good) lecture materials on Ulysses close with the troubling assertion that Molly Bloom is deliberately obscene. Rather than seeing her “gusto for life,” we’d do well to regard her as the creation of a mind trained to think of women as filth: “She is deliberately obscene” as well as “life itself.” Oddly, in retrospect, Eddings’ lust-driven character Salmissra the snake queen also has “The catalogue of Molly’s lovers p 731” (Fonds 7.20), yet her sexuality is neutral, neither good nor bad.

Inconceivable! Political radicals and a modernist legacy amidst fantasy’s medievalisms and reactionary nostalgia? Could Futurism really shake hands with the anti-modern?

 

But more was at work than this curiosity of my transformed childhood fandom. There was a lesson for my other self: the dusty prof in corduroy with elbow patches about to teach the textual variants of Hilda Doolittle. Eddings was a professor teaching modernism about as long as I’ve been as I write this, so underestimating seemed foolish. And if modernist concerns infiltrated Eddings’ fantasy novels, he was surely not alone. William Morris and Hope Mirrlees were obvious early voices, and my crew of radical poets in Personal Modernisms included several who turned to the genre after World War II. They were already infected by modernism. But what of those late arrivals who were only ever in the mainstream, like Eddings or Terry Brooks and Guy Gavriel Kay in the same 1980s moment? Was there anything a modernist might look to in fantasy outside of Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany (and even then perhaps because they sit so close to modernism’s more comfortable discourses with science fiction)? For Eddings, there were also pop culture commentaries that tended toward the dismissive. Farah Mendlesohn calls Eddings’ conclusion to the Mallorean series a choice so predetermined it’s pointless, yet with his lecture notes, the inevitability of choice seems the point. It would be less different from the freedom to believe that two and two is four in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four than the two remaining volumes of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Orwell’s not bad company in which to share modernist sources.

Eddings also had a simple prose style with what some describe as minimal world building without the grit of “real life.” It’s like those who say he wrote for money, as if we don’t find ledgers in modernist notebooks (ahem, Dylan Thomas). But he set the rumours in motion in interviews by saying the commercial success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings inspired his turn to the genre: he found a copy of this late modernist predecessor in a bookshop in its 78th printing and hence a commercial model. His teaching notes and diaries revealed something different: a world as elaborate as Tolkien’s written prior to the narrative that became his Belgariad series. Except, Eddings’ lecture notes on Marx and Engels weren’t wasted, so economic and material conditions preceded ideology in his demesnes, unlike Tolkien… In each course he included a discussion of Marx and “system critics.” In “The Modern Novel,” his course introduction detailed the material forces shaping the aesthetic, structural, generic concerns of the novel form, especially commercial mass production. But for Eddings, the world-building that he built out from these critical interests was expunged from the commercial product (ahem, Lester Del Rey). Tolkien was also in his 1960s syllabus (long before the 78th impression) set amidst British modernists (Woolf, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, no less). So much for the story of commercial opportunism. When we pause to consider fantasy’s world building and form beside the allusive compulsions of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and H.D., it seems odd to exclude such contemporaries and descendants.

The archives also revealed a “real life” with plenty of grit, which differs from the narratives he offered of himself or that provide the biography on Wikipedia. Once seen, it became impossible to overlook in the terribly clean novels, just as his modernist preoccupations with allusion increasingly demanded attention. Even Eddings’ often repeated story of leaving his vaguely described (implicitly sessional or adjunct) tenured teaching post in protest against administrative fiscal greed is belied by his checklist prior to moving away from Dakota. The most important phrase in his “to-do” list is a question not a ledger: whether or not to sue for alienation of marital affections. He abandoned tenure and teaching modernism to work in Safeway, it would seem, to save his marriage. Clearly it was a strong relationship and lasted, and she appeared as co-author to his books after 1996 despite a series of strokes that left her unable to communicate – he cared for her at home, even though by then he was a millionaire. The many goody-goody troubled marriages in his fiction, in this context, suddenly become impossible to ignore, even if the narrative voice never dwells in a way that alienates the young reader. The wizardly drunkards are equally complicated by the drafts in his Alcoholics Anonymous recovery journals and a disturbing life chart graphing emotions against alcohol over a timeline of major events. Like the modernist authors on whom I work – Durrell, Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart, Wilde, Henry Miller – his public comments were storytelling to disguise deep-set intellectual and emotional concerns that, in retrospect, appear blindingly obvious in his superficially simplistic prose. It’s a plainness Hemingway shows took great effort. And yes, even Papa is much there in Eddings’ first novel as a student at Reed, though he valued Faulkner more.

 

I now had a popular pulp author known for squeaky clean narratives who suffered infidelities from his lovers, struggled against addiction for most of his life, abandoned a tenured career for painful reasons, and had read deeply in Joyce, Woolf, Huxley, Amis, Durrell, and many others while admitting to only Chaucer, Spencer, and Malory after his turn to pulp. He even used his time in Alcoholics Anonymous to outline his series The Dreamers as a response to the formal innovations of Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, a work already in his lecture notes as a prototype, just as Dostoyevsky anticipated his prophetic determinism. Was this kind of literary interest typical of the genre as a whole? Well, that’s my next book…

Most tellingly, I set Eddings’ thesis and his fiancée’s, both completed in 1954, side-by-side: his a novel and hers a project on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Four years later, she wrote him a “Dear John” letter remarkably akin to Hemingway’s in In Our Time. It may even have been her model – she too had a college teaching career in literature. It seemed clear to me that a literary author painfully aware of the stylistic complexities of modernist prose had moved from the aesthetic to the commercial. His thesis-as-novel, How Lonely Are the Dead, mirrors Hemingway’s style with Fitzgerald’s concerns, and in his own phrasing, oh boy, was he commercial! The literary and the radical had not, however, vanished. Critiques of settler colonialism appeared in his (anonymous) letters to the editor, his recognition of philosophical anarchism (read: sympathetic) occurs in his lecture notes, and he set up an opponent in fascism (Pound) to set beside elitism (Eliot) in lectures from the mid-1960s that could be trotted out in our notebooks today. My recreational turn to my childhood pulp was not the break I needed after a deep archival project. It was an entangled nest of modernist legacies.

 

While in the basement at Reed, waiting to climb Mount Tabor to pick blackberries (no allusion to Heaney since they were for eating now) with a colleague at work on Mina Loy and Pound (authors deeply influential in Eddings’ lecture notes), I realized it would be ridiculous to keep up the pretence anymore. I cannot not genre modernism. The convoluted academic prose of justifications only showed insincerity. It didn’t work, struggling to keep the modernist, the radical, and the fantastic apart. The scenario’s nearly an allegory – and here, it’s no longer “nearly.” Of course there was a modernist fantasy. Of course modernism and subversion met in a radical fantastic. Of course there was a fantastic form of modernism. And of course their offspring conversed. Of course this was a superficially simple narrative of a quest, from Vancouver to Portland, to find a relic. And of course it really didn’t mean any of those things. It meant something more to literary criticism and conceptualizations of movements, periods, and especially genres. Modernism’s legacy might need as much attention as its origins, its lowbrow as much as any other market, and its persistence and echoes after its moment just as much as its first statements. There’s Nicole Peeler’s modernist PhD before her urban fantasy career, just as Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris: A Poem” precedes the magical Lud-In-The-Mist, or rethinking Eliot’s Arthurian Jessie Weston in the misprisions of the strong poetess of the 1980s Mists of Avalon.

But Goblin Modernism is another project. It’s A Modernist Fantasy, set in motion by a modernist scholar tripping into the archives of fantasy’s popular pulp.

About the Author

James Gifford is Associate Professor in the School of the Humanities and Director of the University Core at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He teaches and writes about too many things in too many disciplines after taking degrees in English, Humanities, and Music. His most recent books include Personal Modernisms and From the Elephant’s Back, his next A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, & the Radical Fantastic is nearing the end of its quest, and he’s just completed a decade-long project, “To seek a home beyond the unknown sea”: The Collected Works of Edward Taylor Fletcher, a nineteenth century multilingual Canadian poet, translator, and travel writer. He also edits the “American Literature: The Twentieth Century” chapter of The Year’s Work in English Studies. He tweets at @GiffordJames and began blogging 15 years too late.

This blog first appeared in The Modernist Review, 30 September 2016.

Academic writing is fraught with bizarre customs. One of the strangest is the sense of an “impact factor” or citations. I began several years ago to write to academics whose work I enjoyed or admired just to say what I’d read and that I’d liked it – they were all surprised. Even those who bordered on academic stardom seemed surprised. We are, after all, trained to critique from the feedback long ago on our very first undergraduate essays: “Your writing is execrable! (A-).” I suspect we are all more accustomed to finding fault than highlighting what works. Being surprised at positive feedback also comes from a custom of measuring writing’s impact by counting the citations it receives or how it gets used, not how we have conversations about it. Those citations are the challenge too, and they find us reading the readers writing. Unlike book reviews or critiques, you really are supposed to read them.

The problem for reading, however, is not only that academics are better at quarreling and quibbling than we are at expanding, extending, enriching, or developing. Most of us share a tendency to define our own work by how we revise or correct someone’s labor of love. Everyone needs to hold tight to the reality that provoking disagreement is actually productive, so finding a reader’s disagreement can be a decent measure of scholarly success. A colleague slyly pointed out at a conference that, in the British context, even “this article is an example of terrible scholarship” counts as a citation for measuring impact. Likewise, Jonathan Goodwin has a quietly polemical account of citation trends (tribes?) in modernist studies through topic modelling and work on quantitative methods more generally. All of that said, my “however” is really about the opposite of citations in the scholarly conversation – I hesitate over the unmeasurable silences. The aporias and the gaps are the more difficult legacy to read in citations and scholarly responses.

I won’t let this become a litany of “people who didn’t cite me.” I have only one example, and it’s neither the most recent nor the worst. A decade ago, I edited a critical edition of a major author’s first book, out of print since the publisher’s stock burned in the London Blitz. I was even lucky enough to have positive reviews from no less than the TLS. So, the silence took another form. A translation appeared six years later. It replicated my erroneous insertion of an incorrect paragraph break (bad editor!) along with a good handful of my footnotes (clearly I was doing something right…). Of course, there was no reference or “pingback” to my edition, editorial apparatus, or annotations. I can live with that – it was a commercial edition, and to be honest, the same rules simply don’t apply. Well, they actually do, but so what?

The rub was later that year attending a conference at which the publisher spoke. He gave an eloquent presentation. I really can’t praise its quality highly enough. I thought it was witty, modest, erudite, and utterly charming. It was so completely magnificent in every way that an old friend sitting next to me who was already familiar with the problematic use of my edition leaned over and whispered “I think I know someone who said that…” It was, of course, my introduction to the book, now in the form of a conference talk.

It does not, of course, end there. Clearly I was on to something so scholastically seductive that it had yet another afterlife in Bucharest for a journal article with more or less the same habits. The point, you see, dear reader, is not a litany of complaints but rather bragging rights. And of course, the more important point is that the odd silences in academia are far more telling and far more stinging than are the open disputes. I’ve previously written about the “insult review” and came to the conclusion that “a bad review fosters interest more than platitudes,” but reading the readers who read is more telling. Like in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, “’Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there “the wind blew out one’s foot-steps like candle-flames”. So it seems to me does reality.’” Those blown out footsteps (and quotations folded within quotations) are the burning citations and aporias of scholarship, without which we lose reality – or we might also lose an impact factor rating, whichever is more important.

So, in line with my other postings in this blog, I must ask, what does this mean for academics interested in professional topics? After all, “the things I wish colleagues had told me 15 years ago when blogging was still new” is how I identified and described this blog. The first answer is “don’t respond to it with lamentations.” To do so risks remembering Conan the Barbarian from the 1980s, and it is also not likely to make any difference. I deliberately used an old and not particularly egregious example for the blog so that I could avoid the impression of lamenting – at the end of the day, there would be no real point, and far worse happens often enough. Someone used my edition for a translation and didn’t mention me. Boo hoo… Well, I didn’t write the novel, and really, isn’t this something to celebrate as a rare impact? Someone used my editorial work for the same “habit” in an article in Old Europe – have I been materially harmed for the vampiric Transylvanian paraphrasing of something that I wasn’t even paid to write? Obviously there’s no harm. There’s even an incidental benefit, and I still cast a shadow. So how does one use that?

The answer, I think, lies in how we fold those errant works back in through citations in our own future writing. When that anecdote that took a month of archival research to uncover appears somewhere else, shepherd it back to the fold. When those in positions of authority (just as much as those on the margins of the discipline) reuse and recontextualize painstakingly assembled textual evidence yet cast its origins to the trash folder of history, cite their conversation with your past work and engage the quarrel. Treat it as you would any other circuitous passive aggressive conflict. It’s just like the conversations about “some people’s children” behind you in the queue… And this means, dear reader, an enormous trust in other scholars to actually read. In an age of Google Books and Google Scholar, the latter of which alerted me automatically to the very troubles I’ve mentioned in this post, it could not be easier to have this trust. Yet, I have absolutely no such trust. And still, I choose to believe in it.

As I’ve said in a previous posting though, I try to model this in my own work by citing as a way of granting recognition, even where it is minimally relevant. No one in the Humanities wants to run the risk of APA style citations that reduce themselves to “anything that shared my keyword search terms.” Having 75 citations for a 3-page critical note really isn’t a help in Sociology, and it’s downright menacing in Literary Studies. But at the same time, the narrative of sharing and recuperating is valuable. As I wrote in my blog last year for being a blind reviewer and giving authors opportunities to be gracious in revisions by citing others,

if it really is only shoring up the fragments of a failed policy on “impact assessment,” the simple “It would be kind to cite Q, R, & S as part of this conversation.” makes the same point. It also gives the author a chance to be seen by the editor in an act of kindness.

That’s reasonable advice for an author doing revisions based on a reader. It’s just as right for an author writing new work and strategically planning the bibliography. The “act of kindness” is now a double agent, a way of refolding those unattributed uses into a new narrative. You can never ensure any particular reader’s approach to any topic you might discuss, but where the development creates blind spots or has historical gaps, some motivated ideologically and others muffled to create the mystique of innovation, a new record can shape how the next reader understands it.

So cite creatively. Cite for representation. Cite beyond the politics of representation too. Cite often. And cite with a sense of solidarity for those colleagues whose work you want to be more visible and who you hope will stand with you.

Being a literary pilgrim is peculiar. Whether it’s Dublin on Bloomsday, blue plaques across London, the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver, or the house like a white die cast on an Ionian shore, we literary folks don’t often think of our research travels as pilgrimages. Yet, in the important respects they really are. And I’ve had my fair share.

The latest has been a surprise. I’m wrapping up a critical edition of the collected works of Edward Taylor Fletcher, a nineteenth century Canadian poet, translator, travel writer, and linguist par excellence. He worked in some 14 languages, and his late long poems blur the landscapes of Europe and Egypt into the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island here in Western Canada. The cast of spirits come as much from the Kalevala or Völuspá as the Mahabharata, which keeps the annotations lively. I made a pilgrimage many years ago to speak about his work for a conference in Kamloops, but I took the long road on the #99 with its single lane bridges to have a better feel for his writing about the landscape. But it was more – he is also a distant ancestor, and his commonplace books were part of my teenage readings before they found a safe haven for the long term in the McPherson Library’s Special Collections in Victoria, BC.

But on my working summer “vacation,” I retraced the steps of his son. Sidney Ashe Fletcher did not have his father’s gifts for poetry and languages, although he did leave an archival trace in a 100 page memoir about his life in New Westminster and Victoria. It’s now in the New Westminster archives. He’s also the voice that opens my edition of his father’s work with a brief biography. His less literary travels took him from a spot a few minutes from my home today up the Fraser River and eventually to Stave Lake.

It would have been quite an experience 130 years ago. Four days by canoe from Sapperton with the help of the flood tide, up the Pitt River, onto the Alouette River, and out to the lake itself – then overland to look down on Stave Lake from just north of where Florence Lake sits between them. He would have looked up to Mount Robie Reid. It’s still no easy trip today.

The Pitt River, the Lillooet River, the Stave and Harrison Rivers, and the lakes from which they came, although well known to the timber cruiser and trapper, had not yet been explored by the great majority of the young men of the City.  I spoke with Dick McBride about this and we arranged to make a trip up the Lillooet River to the Lake.  With us came Dick’s brother-in-law, Allison, a fine looking powerful young fellow, full of enthusiasm and energy.  We got a dug-out canoe in fairly good condition and left from Sapperton late one evening with the flood tide.  In four days we reached the Lake, moving along slowly against the swift cold water, lifting and pulling the canoe over logs and rocks, unloading and portaging past some places where the water fell abruptly among rocky ledges.  On each side of the stream the timber grew tall large and straight in a wonderful dense compact growth.  Reaching the Lake, we camped on the east side just above the outlet.  A high sharp peak stood boldly out on the west side, towering over everything in sight.  The timber grew all around the Lake, in the lower places and high up the slopes of the mountains.

The mud flats on Stave Lake are now reputed to be a home of lawlessness and excess, so far down at the end of the Forest Service Road that even the RCMP fear to tread where this fool rushed. It wasn’t actually so bad as all that… Really, it was better. Idyllic. I didn’t see a soul, though the fading spirits of the trees drowned by the hydro project that damned and raised the level of the lake were haunting across the distance. These would quite possibly be the trees Sidney saw.

The water was clear and still here.  We could see trees and logs of all kinds that had drifted here, and lodging, had in course of time become waterlogged, and got below the surface.  There was an extraordinary collection of these sunken trees piled criss-cross apparently from the bottom of the channel.  Passing through, we found ourselves in another Lake.  We skirted around close in to its south shore.  The mountain here was quite low with very little timber on it.  We got ashore and easily went up to the top.  Here we found to our surprise that we could see the Stave Lake extending below us, and north and south for many miles.

Where we stood on the mud flats and today’s teenagers go for spirits-fuelled adventures (very different angels and fools), he had passed to the North. Rocky Point, beyond the end of the rough road, is the moment of opening to the larger arm of Stave Lake that he’d looked down on after climbing up from Alouette Lake. It was Lillooet Lake then, feeding the Lillooet River – protean names for the protean water, or as his father described the Fraser River (as the Nile) in 1892:

The old Nestorius, worn with many woes,
Cast out, an exile, from the haunts of men,
To all a stranger and an alien,
And seeking only silence and repose,
Passed to the sands of Egypt.
Day by day,
Wrapped in the splendor of the sunlit air,
Which vestured, there, a world so strange and fair,
He watched the mighty river glide away,
For ever passing, and for ever there.

With my young sons with me, I also realized this must have been in some ways like Sidney’s own travels in the wild with his poet-surveyor father, who took him in 1870 to Lac Matapédia just south of the Saint Lawrence River, East from where it opens to become the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. His illustrious father came from England and traveled across Canada from Labrador to Vancouver Island. Sidney traveled from Lac Matapédia to Alouette Lake. My sons may have far to travel too.

And like Lac Kénogami in Quebec, about which Fletcher wrote another long poem, this land has a very long history, the weight of which my sons are beginning to recognize. Stave Lake has revealed artifacts from the Clovis culture in excavations made possible by erosion from the hydro project that dammed the lake, a 1912 dam that reveals a 13,000 year history damned by settlers, my family among them.

I realize this isn’t the experience my colleagues have when they visit Tintern Abbey, Monk’s House, see the blue plaque on Red House, or even the Shrine of Saint Arsenius. I might be the only reader to retread some of these steps deliberately with the text in hand (admittedly on my iPhone…). But I’m almost happier for that.

More than a dozen years ago I was on a small boat, a caïque, as it crawled across a bay in the Mediterranean. I sat beside one of the major critics of our time and had just read a nasty review penned by this anonymous giant of our discipline. After we chatted about lunch, dinner, and nothing in particular, I asked what had troubled this writer of reviews. In answer, I was told “One could not possibly read all the books they send. A few words, good or bad, are only to give it some attention on the reviews page. I don’t worry much about the details.” And in all fairness, more than a dozen years later I can’t make myself disagree – a bad review fosters interest more than platitudes do.

After three blogs on blind review (being, reading, and enduring the reviewer), what about the book review? How do we read the reviewer? It’s a genre in which many of us start out for first publications, which means public commentary precedes prolonged contemplation, but that’s often the reality of it. It’s also service work that does little to grow a cv in comparison to peer reviewed publications, even though publishers value reviews as a measure, and a well-placed review can influence the reception of a book.

My own background, in review, is mixed. I have only a couple handfuls of traditional published book reviews – in fact, my own books have been reviewed more than I’ve written the standard reviews of others for the back pages of one journal or another. The exception is the ever-productive Year’s Work in English Studies, for which I contribute the Poetry section of the “American Literature: The Twentieth Century” chapter. I’ve reviewed books published each year since 2007, and I’ve been fortunate to edit the chapter as a whole for the past six volumes, now happily at work on the seventh (volume 97). It’s an exercise in scope more than precision, taking up the year’s products as a whole to give a sense of the direction in which the discipline is moving from year to year. The purpose is that overview of the year from the Pearl Poet to Pynchon, just as much as it is a brief evaluative description of individual books.

The self-description of The Year’s Work in English Studies speaks for itself, its service to the English Association, and its purpose in Oxford University Press:

“The Year’s Work in English Studies is the qualitative narrative bibliographical review of scholarly work on English language and literatures written in English. It is the largest and most comprehensive work of its kind and the oldest evaluative work of literary criticism. The Year’s Work in English Studies does not merely offer annotated or enumerated bibliography entries, but provides expert, critical commentary supplied for every book covered.” (OUP)

The scope of “American Literature: The Twentieth Century” chapter is a book-length collection of brief reviews. Annually. Relentlessly. Last year the chapter kissed close to 72,000 words on 143 books. I tend to cover 30 or more volumes each year from across a range of presses, occasionally including critical editions or significant reprints, as well as particularly important articles. It’s a return to grad school with comprehensives due at the end of every year… It means I’ve written or am now wrapping up such reviews of some 300+ scholarly books and have edited five-fold that number for reviews by other contributors. Comprehensive exams indeed, and all bundled together annually for anyone to skim through. It is, after all, fast not slow reading.

What makes a useful review?

The most obvious audience for a book review is the author. This is the only person almost certain to read it, and in my experience, to read it before anyone else does. Writers of reviews beware! But with this in mind, the reviewer might think twice about wishing a book weren’t as it is. Every scholar approaches a problem differently. This is why reading a monograph is like peering into the wishes and woes of our colleagues, even more than inspecting their bookshelves… Wishing for more coverage or a different approach is, then, as much a comment to prospective readers as it is a nudge to the author by a reader asking about future work – it also runs the same risk as re-stacking the dishwasher when one’s spouse doesn’t do it “right.” The fix can leave everyone disappointed.

Unlike the writing of peer reviews, the book reviewer offers no suggestions for improvements. The book is done and set free in the world, so at best corrections are for the second edition that rarely occurs in academia. In reality, they’re complaints not correctives. Apart from the author, you’re telling possible readers whether or not this is something to note, and in doing so also shaping those readers’ interpretive schema or predispositions coming to the book.

Because of this, I’ve developed a deep bias about what helps a review. To a degree, it’s descriptive. The review tells the reader something different from the book’s self-description. What is it about rather than what did the author intend it to be about? How does the reviewer see a particular book in relation to trends of the moment and trends over time? In other words, where does it fit and what work does it do (distinct from where the book tells us to put it on our shelves for our peers to inspect and what task it says it meant to achieve)?

In this, it’s like a candid letter of reference. And like a letter of reference, when there’s little to praise, it’s most often better to fall back on description rather than evaluation and recriminations. And when there is something to praise, how do you do it in a way that doesn’t sounds the same as all the echoes filling every other letter and review? I tend to think one accomplishes this by realizing the praise is less important than the contextualization since all superlatives are the very, very best after a while.

A review is also a kind word to librarians. This can mean sales, and library sales are an enormous part of the academic marketplace. It can also mean that when a book has already appeared in full as articles that are likely in an institution’s databases, there’s a duty to say so. No author wants you to, but every reader does. It’s normal to expect parts of a book to appear in articles since this drums up interest and tests the waters, but when every word is already in print (and this does happen), there is a duty to notice it.

Lastly, nearly all academic books are ways of broaching or joining a conversation. The reviewer can ease introductions by reminding interlocutors of each other’s names, where and when they’ve previously met, and by providing some conversation starters. One can as easily say “Mickey and Nyarai, you met last year at Rumbi’s party – didn’t you both study under Professor Dizdar? Remember Tino’s hats?” as “Cold War Modernists and Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics, you met Counter-Revolution of the Word in 2008 – you seem to be all rethinking mid-century conflicts, oh and you vacationed together at that lovely winery in California one summer with Late Modernism & Late Modernism. Did the weather hold?”

What are the trends?

Every press, or almost every press, has a special place on the submission page that marks out “We do not accept unrevised dissertations or theses.” Of course they don’t… Yet, there they are.

There are so many excellent books, it’s hard to say what single trend makes them a joy to read. But for the lightly revised dissertations (including the excellent ones), there’s a very definite trend that almost wafts from the cover boards like the smell of an old book. In part because it is an old book in new wrappers. The pressures of the job market and the tenure path intensify the aroma:

1. defend the dissertation
2. carve out an article or two for the job market
3. carve out a couple more for the tenure process
4. republish the dissertation as a book for tenure

The fifth step is limited to Twitter and conference hallways: criticize adjuncts for not being more research active whilst enjoying the rewards of not really having done any new work since grad school. (That was me coughing beside you…).

This is the very delicate point though. It genuinely helps readers to notice that the “tenure book” reflects a career with little productivity since school days, yet in the same breath how could anyone expect otherwise from colleagues teaching 4+4 and trying to start a “normal” academic life, a family, a mortgage, or the many other human things that are so often delayed in order to earn the PhD? “Gently” is how readers can expect it. And “indirectly” and “gently” is how one can say it when readers ought to know.

I see the second trend as much in applications for adjunct work as I do as a reviewer, and it’s more concerning:

1. defend the dissertation
2. carve out an article or two for the job market
3. publish the dissertation as a book for the job market
4. start a new book for the tenure process

Time on a postdoc can alter this flow, but the “job book” appears to be a growing phenomenon, especially for mid-level presses aimed almost exclusively to the library market. And there’s nothing wrong with such presses either – they can be much preferred for some good projects. It does, however, give the reader material conditions to consider.

The fourth stage of a brand new book for tenure may seem like the academic ideal (full disclosure: I did this), but it also reflects fast research during the most pressure-filled years of an academic career. It might not be a revised dissertation, but it’s written amidst new course preps and the potentially prickly entrance to the profession. Both are troubled.

This is to say, the reviewer really cannot and should not overlook the nature and needs of the book. Books that fulfill career requirements simply cannot be read the same way as those that come after tenure and therefore without the same material demands on the author. Many of those first or second books are excellent, many are good, and some are perfectly good enough. There are a few others too… But they served their purpose before they were first read in their bound state. And the reviewer shouldn’t forget that the review itself can be added to (or carefully quoted in) the tenure file.

If you want to know the scholarly trends in any given year, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to read the book…

What can a review do best?

The most helpful part of the reviews I read is also, in the Year’s Work context, among the most difficult. YWES includes a helpful parenthetical reference habit akin to the polite introduction: “Title (Publisher [Year]; reviewed in YWES Vol.[Year]). This means a review can contextualize a work’s place within the year’s work as well as over time in the reviews of other years’ works. I increasingly write things such as “Melba Cuddy-Kean, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat’s Modernism: Keywords takes its inspiration from Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana [1976]; reviewed in YWES 56[1977]) but expands to include features and methodologies updated to correspond with the New Modernist studies and digital humanities.” It’s not glowing praise, but I suspect it shapes how readers then turn to the book.

Where this is most productive and also most demanding on the reviewer is stitching a web of connections between books in recent years. When James Clawson notices modernism “is often imagined as entailing a ‘great divide’ between art and daily life” and that “Mary Chapman’s Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism” rejects this division, he follows it with a genealogy: “as has been argued in recent years by Irene Gammel’s Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (MITP [2002]), Bryony Randall’s Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (UGlasP [2008]), Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary (OUP [2009]; reviewed in YWES 90[2011]), and Siobhan Phillips’s The Poetics of the Everyday (ColUP [2010]; reviewed in YWES 91[2012]).” (YWES 95[2016]). I think there’s an emerging trend. I think the reader knows where to find it.

In the same sense, to see the volumes of the collected writings of Robert Duncan in comparison with each other is helpful. Yet, it’s better still to see Duncan’s The H.D. Book and its impact on the recent critical editions of H.D.’s unpublished writings and the palimpsest of monographs about H.D. from the past few years. It is just as helpful to see the Duncan editions now being used in articles, how attention to Ezra Pound’s reading ability in Chinese shapes attention to his Latin, the content changes that occur between the various Cambridge Companions by editors who “make it ‘New’,” the growth of modernist studies into the Cold War, or the differing impacts of books in a series (OUP’s Modernist Literature & Culture, for instance).

The fabric woven by those connections, or what I prefer to think of as a cable knitting, shows books nestled among a series of relations. The cable seems more flexible and interconnected than the links in a chain.

Back on the caïque

I didn’t know what to say to my scholarly senior on that small boat looking across the waters of the Adriatic to Albania. Maybe I was in awe. Maybe I’d had too much sun. After ten years of writing reviews, I now don’t think I’d ask the question at all. Lunch, dinner, and nothing in particular are actually better topics of conversation. But I remember the review, and it provoked me to pick up the book. It was more effective than a summary or verbal obeisance could ever have been.

More and more, I think the praise or condemnation are the least important parts of the book review. Instead I think of its connections, its links, its introduction of an interpretive schema before the reading starts, and its junk pile of interchangeable clippings for administrative and professional uses by authors and presses. These are the review’s real service work. We hardly know when someone reads our articles. Occasionally, kind souls send a note when they do. But the book review gives the author the whisperings of at least one reader in an otherwise strangely silent echo chamber.

I’ve written Letters to a Young Reader of Reviews about being described as “execrable” and also about the time involved in writing these reviews for other readers of reviews, so it’s apt to think a little about what content goes into a reasonable review that tries to be useful.

I can’t say if I’ve written comparatively many or few blind reviews for other people to read and gnash over, mainly because as a profession we don’t seem to talk openly (or even secretively) about the topic much… Academia is secretive, and by and large what happens in blind review stays in blind review, or else I’m simply not in the club that does and hears the talking. That silence can make it difficult to get better at reviewing over time or easier for personal grumpinesses to seem like a reasonable way of opening discussions with colleagues – my thoughts here are the things I’ve done to try to write more useful peer reviews for my colleagues to read.

All in all, I’ve probably been someone’s peer reviewer for a few dozen books and the blind reviewer for somewhere more than double that number of articles. I also edit the “American Literature: The Twentieth Century” chapter of the expansive Year’s Work in English Studies (more on that in a later post), which means I write reviews of some 30–40 publications every year to give a sense of what’s happening across the field (American Poetry) while editing a book-length set of book reviews at the same time. It’s books upon books, really. Annually. Relentlessly. Richly. I’m doing my ninth year of those reviews right now.

So the question is, what’s actually helpful in a reviewer’s comments? What commentary helps to move something from a submission to a publication? After all, if the assessment and comments aren’t helpful to the publisher and author, what was the point of the volunteer labour?

The most obvious question in any assessment is “To print or not to print?” followed by “If not here, where?” I think the second can matter the most. If the work doesn’t suit the journal or press, where would it suit (after suitable revisions). Relatively few works are unpublishable in principle, but many are unsuitable. I’ve seen more than a few works that were well worth printing but certainly not where they’d been sent – getting those to press shouldn’t become a game of What Have I Got In My Pocket.

I also try to imagine myself as the author receiving the comments, and not so that I can better appreciate writers tears (I have no taste for it, and I don’t want to develop one). It’s much too easy to communicate poorly or to say something harshly that was not intended – “I have shot mine arrowroot o’er the horse” or other terrors of autocorrect can make the corrective into the crass. If I have a point, I try to say “This is the main point” or more often “I consider this the key revision to make” and “These are now suggestions for the author to consider as s/he sees fit.” The review, unlike the writing, does not need lovely prose. Likewise, and exactly as with student papers, I aim to restate the thesis in my comments with the explicit proviso that if I get it wrong, the author might wish to take steps to prevent me from being wrong in this way again.

Have you cited my friends?

When government policy sets up “impact assessments” that count citations (even those like “Any idiot would know not to trust Gifford (73)”), it creates a pressure to put pressure on others to cite. Rather than “why haven’t you cited me,” I think a better question is “What will readers expect to see?” or some form of “What revision is this project making in the established discourse?” followed up quickly with “If it’s making that revision, what works does it need to signal to make that change?”

Most importantly, if a previous scholar’s work needs a response in the article, I say so directly and emphasize that it’s my opinion that readers are likely to expect it – in contrast, if it really only merits a casual footnote at the author’s discretion, I say that instead. And if it really is only shoring up the fragments of a failed policy on “impact assessment,” the simple “It would be kind to cite Q, R, & S as part of this conversation” makes the same point. It also gives the author a chance to be seen by the editor in an act of kindness.

To cull or to cultivate?

I tend to hesitate more and more before asking for expansions or further developments in articles. It feels too much like asking an article to be more like my articles… I worry about that and as a consequence ask myself twice if that’s actually what I’m doing (“Am I just saying how I’d go about this task?”) then ask it once more for good measure.

Instead, I find myself suggesting cuts. Much like a conference paper, I very rarely look back to discover I’ve written in the margins of a journal or print off “Couldn’t this be longer?” As with the conference paper, no one takes offense if you wrap up at the 17 minute mark. And if the author really does have two distinct arguments, it’s a kindness to point out s/he really has two articles worth of work here, not just one.

Am I the right reader?

The most pressing question I ask myself as a blind reviewer is whether or not I’m the right reader. Do my own predilections and preferences lead me to like or dislike something that the target audience would feel very differently about? How does this shape my evaluation as distinct from my taste? Most especially, if I disagree with the author, have I given her or him the respect of actually saying so explicitly in the review and then outlining a reasonable way to manage those disagreements without changing his or her position? Have I shown a pathway for a positive assessment of things contrary to my own stance? Have I also made is clear to the editor that I disagree and should be read in light of that?

In a sense, much of this comes down to whether peer review is a way of broaching a conversation or guarding a portal. Conversations may have their appropriate places and polite conventions, but they are also based on some shared identity through analogy – those analogies make us a community of colleagues even amidst great differences. Guards tend toward silence and emphasize what keeps us apart.