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  • The 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature: My Shortlist

    Posted on by David
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    Bloopers loves books so much!

    WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE MEAN TO READ

    A few years ago I mentioned to a good friend of mine who is a writer that I have never read Midnight’s Children. He didn’t say anything, but it was the kind of not-saying-anything with beats to it. I would say a full eight bars. “I’ve been meaning read it,” I assured him, as his silence began a second phrase, “I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”

    Like most readers, I hold in mind a list of books I’ve been meaning to read. It’s a list which includes books I almost certainly will actually read, but also others, many others, which, to the end, I will only ever mean to read. Which is to say, my list is a hedge against mortality. Such lists always are. It is defensive in other ways too: to say I mean to read a certain book – Emma, for instance – salves the moral sting of not having read it. That it is an ever-expanding list paradoxically marks the rise in my sins of omission while shoring up my sense of rectitude; surely knowing what I lack mitigates the lacking.

    Though equally unread, not all books I mean to read are equal; some glower from a higher shelf – it seems correct to say that my not having read Don Quixote is a more serious omission than not having read Midnight’s Children – while others have partisans. For example, I distinctly hear Harold Bloom Jewish mothering me for allowing my Shakespeare read-through to stall after Richard III. (“If you can bear living without the poetry of Romeo and Juliet, well then go right ahead. Who am I to say? Clearly nobody ‘t all.” “But Harold. I read it in high school. And I’ve seen the Zeffirelli, and even Leonardo DiCaprio.” “I’m just saying.”) Susan Sontag has been hectoring me from beyond the grave to read The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis. You know, the 19th century Brazilian novelist. My friend Nathan is concerned that I haven’t read more of the daftly brilliant little novels of César Aira. I, absolutely, mean to read them all. Pax, everyone.

    In the wake of Nadine Gordimer’s death, my failure to have read Midnight’s Children began to afflict me, like a cramp, or hunger. As I sifted through material about her, Rushdie’s name kept popping up. As would be expected, she had been among his defenders during the years of the fatwa. In her Nobel lecture, she asserted that “he has done for the postcolonial consciousness in Europe what Günter Grass did for the post-Nazi one with The Tin Drum and Dog Years, perhaps even has tried to approach what Beckett did for our existential anguish in Waiting For Godot[.]” (Who doesn’t love a healthy flirtation with hyperbole, especially when it may prove to be (a) not a flirtation, or (b) not hyperbole.) In 2005, novels by both Gordimer and Rushdie were among the six nominees for the “Best of the Booker”, a one-time award given for the single best novel to have been awarded a Booker Prize in the award’s forty-year history. Gordimer was represented by The Conservationist, Rushdie by Midnight’s Children. Rushdie won.

    Enough. It was time to leave off meaning to read Midnight’s Children and actually crack the cover. At the time of this writing, I’m about a third of the way through, and can say, unequivocally, it is one of the best thirds of a novel I’ve ever read. I recognize this species of delight; it attended my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. The Adventures of Augie March also, and, oh yes, A House for Mr. Biswas. The sheer vigor and complexity of this third-of-a-novel disposes me to make a chain of assumptions: 1. that the second two thirds will match the first, 2. that, as expert testimony has it, The Satanic Verses at the very least equals it, and, 3. that the rest of Rushdie’s oeuvre, if not, perhaps, on the same Parnassian level, bears similar markings of genius. All of which leads me to wonder about the hold-up in Stockholm.

    There is, to be sure, a logjam of great writers waiting to be laureled. But, as time slips by and Rushdie remains uninvited to Stockholm’s annual highbrow powwow, the Swedish Academy comes ever closer to committing another of its stinkers. There will be much to answer for if they allow him to go the way of Carlos Fuentes, W. G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf. Perhaps he is on their own list –of writers they are meaning to honor.

     

    MY SHORTLIST

    In addition to Salman Rushdie, my 2014 shortlist of Nobelable writers includes three other novelists and a poet. A more stunning group of writers you will never find. Read these experts. Listen, as you read, to how the grief and splendor of living rushes from their words in a spiritual torrent which would wash most of us away if channeled through our own faculties. Listen to how Algerian novelist Assia Djebar evokes the inner life of a “woman of the veil” who has just learned that her husband, a rebel in the Algerian War for Independence, is in grave danger, and chooses to surmount all the prohibitions of her society in order to find and warn him. Australian poet Les Murray is famously querulous, but listen to how in “A Dog’s Elegy” he grows tender, wittily mystical, disarming with image and verbal delight his reader’s defenses against the enormity of death. Listen carefully to Péter Nádas‘s narrator – young, bisexual, Hungarian, hyper-aware – and you’ll hear, in his account of learning to communicate with a young German poet with whom he is in love, the catastrophe of modern Hungary. Listen to Philip Roth, the American perennial, in one of his sublime rants which, as always with him, transcends that descriptor by saying something so heartbreakingly true about human nature that, for all it’s clattering expansiveness, it comes off like Shakespeare. And Salman Rushdie. Listen to him. Am I wrong?

     

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    “Small things come in big packages.” —Assia Djebar (b. 1936)

    1. Assia Djebar (Algeria)

    She’d forgotten the danger itself. In truth, it’s perhaps not that which drove her, but rather a gnawing desire to suddenly know whether she could really spend her life waiting in her room, in patience and love. That’s why she crossed the entire town, bared her presence to so many hostile eyes, and at the end of her trek discovered that she was not only a prey for the curiosity of men — a passing shape, the mystery of the veil accosted by the first glance, a fascinating weakness that ends up being hated and spat upon — no, she now knows that she existed. She’s been inhabited by one inflexible thought that has made her untouchable. “Get to Youssef! He’s in danger,” she had repeated. “But is he, really?” she ended up wondering when she found herself alone on the curb surrendering to, or even beyond, the same fruitless waiting. “Won’t he first of all be shocked to see me here, out in the street?” No, the danger is real.

    (Children of the New World)

     

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    ”Some people are born to fatness. Others have to get there.” —Les Murray (b. 1938)

    2. Les Murray (Australia)

    A Dog’s Elegy

    The civil white-pawed dog who’d strain
    to make speech-like sounds to his humans
    lies buried in the soil of a slope
    that he’d tear down on his barking runs.

    He hated thunder and gunshot
    and would charge off to restrain them.
    A city dog too alive for backyards,
    we took him from the pound’s Green Dream

    but now his human name melts off him;
    he’ll rise to chase fruit bats and bees;
    the coral tree and the African tulip
    will take him up, and the prickly tea trees.

    Our longhaired cat who mistook him
    for an Alsatian flew up there full tilt
    and teetered in top twigs for eight days
    as a cloud, distilling water with its pelt.

    The cattle suspect the Dog lives
    but three kangaroos stood in our pasture
    this daybreak, for the first time in memory,
    eared gazing wigwams of fur.

    (Conscious and Verbal)

     

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    “By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one’s expectations crashing down.” — Péter Nádas (b. 1942)

    3. Péter Nádas (Hungary)

    But as he listened to me, a radically different process was also taking place in him: as usual, he kept correcting my grammatically faulty sentences, he did this almost unawares, it had become an unconscious habit between us; in fact, he was the one who shaped my sentences, gave them the proper structure, incorporated them into the neat order of his native language, I had to rely on his expropriated sentences to work my way through my linguistic rubble, had to use his sentences to tell my story, and didn’t even notice that some of these jointly produced sentences were repeated two or three times, their place and value reshuffled, before reaching intelligible form.

    It was as if I had to use my own past to coax the story of his past out of him. I didn’t think of it then, but now I believe we needed these evening walks not just for the exercise but to relate to the world around us — which we both felt, though for different reasons, to be cheerless and alien — and to do it in a way that this same world would not be aware of what we were doing.

    (A Book of Memories)

     

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    “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” —Philip Roth (b. 1933)

    4. Philip Roth (United States)

    You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home and tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

    (American Pastoral)

     

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    “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” —Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)

    5. Salman Rushdie (Great Britain)

    Why had she married him?—For solace, for children, But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don’t always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet’s face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: “You big ungrateful goof, can’t you see who is your husband now? Don’t you know what a husband deserves?” To avoid fruitless controversy about the answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother’s opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and his insomnia, found she couldn’t naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes…in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.

    (Midnight’s Children)

     

    The 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded soon. Share with us, here at The Shelf: Who do you think will win? (My bets are on Assia Djebar this year.) Who do you think should win?


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  • In Memoriam: Nadine Gordimer — who subversively wrote as well as she could

    Posted on by David
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    Nadine Gordimer 1923 – 2014

    In repressive regimes everywhere – whether in what was the Soviet block, Latin America, Africa, China – most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist’s rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer’s themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.

    – from the Nobel Lecture: “Writing and Being”

    In an autobiographical essay published in the New Yorker in 1954, Nadine Gordimer described a hill rising from the veld on the outskirts of her home town near Johannesburg, barren save for patches of sparse grass through which showed a blackness “even a little blueness, the way black hair shines”. The hill was a coal dump, so old as to be covered by a layer of blown earth. “Diabolical”, she called it, “forsaken”, and – her best word – “inert”, for at some point, no one knew when, this remnant of a long abandoned coal mine had caught fire, and the slow, low burning had continued, hidden beneath its top layers, day and night, for many years. She recalled the surrounding earth feeling warm beneath her feet. She remembered seeing the glow at dusk in the bald patches where grass would not grow. She knew a girl who had been horribly disfigured from burns sustained while playing on the hill. Her mother remembered a boy who had been buried in a landslide and not even his bones had been found. On one side of the coal dump was the outer edge of town, the “location”, where the blacks lived. Further from the dump, in the direction of the town center, were the neighborhoods of what she described as “our sedate little colonial tribe, with its ritual tea parties and tennis parties.” On the other side was the local nursing home which served also as a hospital and clinic, where her mother spent many long days.

    It’s a striking image, this smoldering hill, though susceptible to portentousness. Even a very good writer of lesser gifts might have worried it toward the gothic. Gordimer doesn’t interfere with it, pretending there is nothing deliberate about it’s inclusion in her narrative, calling it no more than a memory, one among many which occurred to her in the course of writing. Attuned, as she writes in her Nobel lecture, “to the state of being manifest in life around her”, she knows this Hades-like image is organic to her theme and will pay its own way. The title of the essay is “A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape”. A reader with even cursory awareness knows full well what that mountain of hidden burning alludes to —in South Africa.

    When she wrote this, the great novels, The Conservationist, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, A Sport of Nature, were still to come.

    imageWhile the tributes which have flooded the internet and news publications in the past two weeks all get around to acknowledging what a towering writer she was, it was her activism that tends to make the headlines and to frame whatever else is said of her. The value claimed for her novels and stories, as good as they are, is largely extra-literary. She is routinely revered as a kind of warrior writer who courageously laid bare the viciousness of apartheid. Arguably the highest compliment she was ever paid came from the South African government, years before the Nobel, when it banned three of her books. It is put forth as as a testament to her greatness that she was one of the first people Nelson Mandela wanted to see upon release from prison. “But she was a writer first,” the articles protest, then back up what should be self-evident with examples of her post-apartheid subject matter and her vigorous contribution to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. With intentions to the contrary, her life often comes off sounding like a kind of bourgeois parable illustrating that one can still find fulfillment in life’s third act, even after everything has changed. Imagine Samuel Beckett requiring such a defense.

    imageSusan Sontag issued a corrective to this view of her in 2004 in the inaugural Nadine Gordimer Lecture, the last speech she ever gave: “But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) In the end — that is to say, from the point of view of literature — Nadine Gordimer is not representative of anybody or anything but herself. That, and the noble cause of literature. Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.” In a kind of relay race among literary insiders, Sontag took her declaration that a writer’s primary task is to write well from Gordimer’s Nobel lecture in which she, in turn attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez the belief that “The best way a writer can serve a revolution is to write as well as he can.” (His actual words, spoken to a journalist friend, were “In reality the duty of a writer — the revolutionary duty, if you like — is that of writing well.” The implication of each is slightly different, but holds to the idea that writing is a moral act.)

    A great writer is like a thief, stealing from the treasury of the world’s wordless and recondite state of being more meaning for her words than is their legal due. Among living writers, Alice Munro is one of the most light-fingered, stashing more significance into the hidden pockets of her pokerfaced sentences than most writers acquire by honest means in the space of a paragraph. Gordimer was like this. She was more cerebral by half than Munro. She was more at home with artifice – Toni Morrison is a closer relative in this regard – taking occasional well-judged flights from realism. For example, Munro would never write a story in the form of an answer to Franz Kafka’s famous “Letter to His Father” from the father himself, one deceased to another. Nor would she gather Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Anthony Sampson, all of them dead, for colloquy at a Chinese restaurant. But like Munro she could smuggle a mother lode of emotional impact and intellectual weight right under her readers’ noses and deposit her hoard on the page. Listen to how she packs away a startling wealth into this unassuming description of a two-room township house in her story “A City of the Dead, A City of the Living”:

    The front door of the house itself opens into a room that has been subdivided by greenish brocade curtains whose colour had faded and embossed pattern worn off before they were discarded in another kind of house.

    First off, a subdivided room was, by definition, once whole. That someone decided on this make-do solution makes the brocade curtains a comedown even before we learn they are faded and worn. They’re not green, mind you, but “greenish”. Of course they are second hand, who would do this with something nice? But it’s that ending, “discarded in another kind of house”, that makes you realize what she’s pulled on you after its far too late to man your defenses. What kind of house? The least that can be said is that it was one in which brocade curtains could be discarded. Like the smoldering coal dump haunting the edges of her childhood, the almost off-handed pitting of a township house with its second-hand dividing curtains against “another kind of house”, without ever mentioning the dynamics between blacks and whites in a society hideously deformed by apartheid, lends an emotional impact anything more explicit would subvert. In the span of a phrase, it becomes that kind of story.

    A sentence like this functions as a hologram, not only of the story itself, but, of the mind of it’s writer. Gordimer thought more, and more complexly, about the world she observed than most of us could ever hope to. But, as can happen with genius, the complexity of her mind occasionally ran away with her capacity to make it’s products syntactically approachable. In this passage from her meditation on the craft of writing, “The Dwelling Place of Words” (2001), we hear her thoughts chasing each other into a logjam of a sentence:

    And in the increasing interconsciousness, the realization that what happens somewhere in the world is just one manifestation of what is happening subliminally or going to happen in one way or another, affect in one way or another, everywhere – the epic of emigration, immigration, the world-wandering of new refugees and exiles, political and economic, for example – is a fatal linkage, not ‘fatal’ in the deathly sense, but in that of inescapable awareness in the writer.

    It all makes perfect sense on about the third pass. All clauses are resolved, all modifiers firmly attached, indeed all the requirements of an English sentence are fulfilled, but the reader has nonetheless endured a moment of terror, sure he’s made a fatal turn in the labyrinth and will not escape. But what the reader gets, even on a first pass, is a kind of urgency, an imperative  that he be given a full account of what is important. We hear the shameful secrets of the times, the pressures and distortions of society weighing on her moral sensibility, and there is so much to say about it. If she could stack the words on top of each other she would.

    imageIn 2006 a biography came out which purported to tell the truth about Nadine Gordimer. It was a biography she had authorized. And then rescinded, going so far as to block its US release. The hypocrisy of a white liberal woman, her unconscious racism, an affair – these were some of its haul, confiscated, supposedly, from the iconic status of its subject. Among the biographer’s claims was that certain elements of the essay “A South African Childhood” had been fabricated. And so a seed of doubt is planted: is the subterranean smolder of the coal dump in a land on the edge of igniting factual, or a storyteller’s invention? And, more at issue, is this important? It seems to me that serious readers, by this late date, are grown up enough to know better than to troll autobiography for facts. What kind of reader would turn to, say, Garcia Marquez, for a balanced reckoning? This does not evade the question. Only, how one feels about the answer, disillusioned, vindicated, or more or less unaffected, will depend on what one is reading for, news about the horse from the horse’s mouth, or a brilliant and complex woman’s passionate engagement with her subject and it’s telling.


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  • And speaking of Pearl S. Buck…(part 3)

    Posted on by David
    King Gustavus V of Sweden presenting the Nobel Prize to Pearl Buck in December, 1938

    The woods in Robert Frost’s mind were particularly snowy on that day in 1938 when Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize.  “If she can get it, anyone can,” he famously declaimed in rather artless iambic tetrameter, stating more succinctly than anyone to follow an opinion which has ever since dogged both the author and the orchard keepers of that peculiar Northern grove of literary reputations. Buck herself knew what a problematic choice she was, and the weight of this knowledge lead her to a gracious humility (of which she evidently cured herself in later years). In an interview with the New York Times she bowed to Theodore Dreiser as the more deserving author and acknowledged feeling “diffident in accepting the award.”  In her acceptance speech she said, “I can only hope that the many books which I have yet to write will be in some mearsure a worthier acknowledgment than I can make tonight.”  It all must have been a bit much for her; as Peter Conn, her most eloquent contemporary apologist, points out, she went from being unpublished and unknown to winning the Nobel Prize in less than ten years.  It strikes me as both touching and a little melancholy that this most popular of American writers felt compelled to make public statements like crossed index fingers raised against a tide of negative opinion.

    Of course, not all opinion was negative. When The Good Earth, her famous tale of a Chinese farmer’s perseverance in the face of crushing odds, was published in 1931, it found an acutely well-primed audience. America was plummeting down the steep slopes of the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s monumental contribution to the literature of perseverance, was not published until 1939, which means that The Good Earth was the brightest literary beacon on the horizon for most of America’s darkest hour since the Civil War.

    Her admirers, from the Nobel Committee to the Chinese American author, Maxine Hong Kingston, have lauded her for being the first writer to bring China to the attention of the West. Kang Liao, author of Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific, goes further, saying that her books were valuable, not only to Americans, but “to us Chinese in learning about ourselves and particularly about the majority of the Chinese people, the peasants and farmers of whom we had little truthful and realistic representation in literature until after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976.” Historian James Thomson rather more extravagantly called her “the most influential Westerner to write about China since thirteenth century Marco Polo.”

    But out of the chorus of her defenders’s voices, variously pitched – earnest, sometimes aggrieved, sometimes rather missionary – a curious lacuna arises: They can’t quite get around to praising the writing itself.  Some make a virtue of this by disowning the problem. In an essay cagily entitled “Who’s Afraid of Pearl S. Buck”, Jane Rabb takes up her sling against literary academics, a perennially heroic enterprise, and not without some justification.  She writes, “After the Second World War, literary scholars favored the New Criticism, a close analysis of texts independent of history and biography, an approach no more suited to Buck’s writing than its convoluted successors, Structuralism and Deconstructionism.” American educator, historian, and literary critic Oscar Cargill charged that, “To reflective Americans outside the [literary] fraternity… the prize seemed well given as a reminder that pure aestheticism is not everything in letters. If the standard of her work was not so uniformly high as that of a few other craftsmen, what she wrote had universal appeal and a comprehensibility not too frequently matched.” That “few other craftsmen” comes across as a pricy concession paid for on credit.  Cargill was the author of notable books on both Eugene O’Neill and Henry James, a Nobel laureate and a writer who should have been, neither noted for their “appeal and comprehensibility”. He clearly understood Buck’s shortcomings and all but says “Let’s not go there.”

    In his book, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Peter Conn uses Elizabeth Janeway’s New York Times review of Buck’s 1952 novel, The Hidden Flower, to bring in the feminist critique.  I quote at length Conn’s quoting of the author of Man’s World, Women’s Place:

    “Always widely read,” Janeway wrote, “and at one time the object of critical study, Pearl Buck is…relegated today to some amorphous anteroom of writing halfway – or more – between serious literary effort and best-sellerdom.” Criticism which placed high value on “the private struggle of a human mind with its interior world,” had no tolerance for Pearl, who dealt in busy plots and created characters that behaved like types.  Even more damaging, Pearl’s “bias toward morality and toward a belief in order and in generosity,” made her seem merely naive in the eyes of what Janeway called the “intellectual critics,” who mistrusted love and preferred squalor to transcendence.

    Janeway’s tone is sympathetic, but defensive and slightly baffled – Although she wants Pearl’s work to be taken more seriously, she isn’t quite sure how to make the case.  In the end, she resorts to a rudimentary feminism, identifying Pearl’s importance with her female redership:  “[I]t is too bad that Miss Buck’s audience is, par excellence, the audience that is ignored by contemporary critics of writing[:] the American middle-class woman who reads novels.”  (p. 329).

    So, if Pearl Buck’s reputation has fluttered downward from literary icon to one of the names most frequently raised against the Nobel and its process of selection, the fault, according to her arbiters, lies not with her frequently leaden pen and the hassle-free moral universe her character’s inhabit, but with those who value their opposites: facetted writing serving moral complexity.  Their arguments take fertile points of inquiry, such as the strong appeal she had for middle-class women, and turn them into smoke bombs, obscuring the issue of her shortcomings and making it all about the anti-feminist elitism of her critics.  The charge is not only unfounded but wrong-headed that someone who prefers, say, the high-wire act of The Adventures of Augie March, or the suspiration of time and meaning’s elusivity evoked by the very language of To the Lighthouse, ipso facto “mistrusts love and prefers squalor to transcendence,” and are therefore ill-dispossed to give Buck a fair reading.

    Better, wouldn’t it be, to disentangle the issues, make separate files, as it were.  In one file we place her rich biography – daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in a Chinese backwater, growing up speaking Mandarin before speaking English, founder of the first international inter-racial adoption agency, her ins and outs with the Chinese government, her difficult relationships with various men. In a separate pile we place her singular role as mouthpiece of the East to the West, the first to really define China for American and European readers. In a third file we address Janeway’s fascinating and somewhat touchy claim that she was primarily a “woman’s writer.” (How fun it would be to make about ten sub-files out of that one, one of which would be her emergence on the roster of America’s most remarkable and influential women.)  In a fourth, we put the unavoidable fact that her prolific output is highly uneven, that her writing is clearly not that of a first-rank literary artist, and an investigation into why this is so by, yes Ms. Rabb, looking at the texts themselves.

    When we step beyond the barracks of both her defenders and detractors, she all at once ceases to be a two-dimensional figure, a commodity useful to various agendas, and emerges as a fascinating writer, worth investigating on her own terms.  The only question remaining is one to be answered by individual readers: Does her cultural and historical moment provide sufficient reason to spend time with her books, or is life too short to read her at the risk of missing Chekhov, or Proust?


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