It might well have turned out if I had been in analysis with Edmund Bergler that he might have gotten me to confront why I always seem to be reading, along with my usual several books at a time, something by someone who is so way smarter than I am that I have to struggle, stop, do research, struggle more, and slog through for months at a time. At least that's what seems to happen with me, repeatedly, even without the help of Psychoanalysis. (Bergler would probably have said that I need a bully in my life.) Which is why I am still slogging through Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View. About which more if I ever finish reading it; but in the mean time, for whatever reason Zizek was discussing Henry James and mentioned James's novel Princess Cassamasima and intrigued, I snapped it up on Kindle and had trouble putting it down till I finished it, it being seductive as hell. My ever youthful persona had no trouble at all identifying with the main character, a young man by the name of Hyacinth. Unusual name for a boy, I thought, but I guess not so, during the time of this story. What was that time? I'll just have to guess, so for now let's say 1880s.
The young man is a bastard; son of an aristocrat and a working class woman who has killed the aristocrat and is dying of consumption in a London jail. The young man is beautifully drawn and though I am not a bastard I had complete identification with him. I see myself as sweet, small, blond and precocious, even though I'm a glum portly averaged height grey-haired 76 year old.
Let me just say here that I don't seem to have much ambition towards book reviewing, something I've noticed just recently while perusing some of the reviews on Goodreads. (I've done a few Goodreads reviews myself but more on that later.) There are many awful ones and some great ones and some that are partly good. I read one just now about "Cassamasima" which I liked and which lets the reader know how good the descriptive parts are. I'll just agree with that reviewer. What I'm more interested in here is why I am drawn to the story, which is, pure and simply, the seduction. Hyacinth is seduced by an impossibly beautiful aristocrat who is the wife of an Italian, [is he Italian?] Prince, whom she has abandoned, for I guess, matters of mental cruelty or something. Our boy has recently been drawn in to a small circle of radical leftists who believe that The Revolution is at hand. And so I guess you could say that Hyacinth "stumbles" across this wealthy aristocrat who also happens to be a believer in this Just Cause.
Like Hyacinth, over the course of my long and arduous life I have stumbled across, and found quite seductive, more than one, perhaps I could say several women who in the culture in which I have lived could be considered each in her own way aristocrats; members of the privileged upper class. Like any culture of any size, like say 19th c. England or France, my 20th Century America had many kinds of upper class. Those included the Catholic, the Jewish, the WASP, the Progressive Left Wing cultural elite; all of which had their own Country Clubs, except the Left Wing, which had PEN as its international club, and included for community The New School in NYC, the Guild Hall, in East Hampton, and a long list of other appurtenances. I have been writing about these adventures in an as yet uncompleted manuscript with working title Hold On, for a decade or two, and expect to have said manuscript cremated along with my remains when it comes to that.
On a related front, Anthony West has become my new best friend. I suppose it doesn't hurt that he's dead. He's unlikely to become a pest. But there's no doubt I didn't stumble across him by accident. I read his mother's great book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb Grey Falcon some thirty years ago, partly because I was reacting emotionally to my father's recent death, and partly because I had evolved into a sort of connoisseur of especially good non-fiction. And once I had read that very long book I sort of realized that I was in a committed relationship with Rebecca West, to the point where I'd begun calling her Rebecca. (Her really close friends called her Cicily.)
I've written briefly about Rebecca and Anthony's lifelong love-hate relationship with each other in another post on this blog and I would like to add that I'm unaware of any book that does justice to that long battle. It would have to be someone with the attitude of a conscientious and fair referee. Anthony was no slouch; he didn't just ride along on the coattails of his famous parents. Like his parents he didn't go to college. Unlike either parent, he started with a non-literary career, cattle farming. Eventually, though, with the help of what I expect was an autodidactic impulse, he began writing. And, eventually, he ended up in the U.S., writing reviews for The New Yorker, where he stayed for the rest of his life, living not far from this writer, on Fisher's Island, and later Stonington, Connecticut.
O. K., let me not get away from my attachment to mother and son. I've confessed to being in love with Rebecca, in the only way that one can be with someone who is in the Spirit World, and I've admitted a similar attachment to the son, also long gone from the material world; his being my new best friend. Therefore, I must insist that I am not conflicted on this cause. I can handle it.
I've examined at some length over my lifetime my own neurotic baggage from a childhood of having been raised by two narcissistic artists who, in laying their personalities and their relationship fireworks on me caused unavoidable covert incest [psychological, not literal] damage to be inflicted on my over-sensitive pre-adolescent psyche. (About which I hasten to add I am not whining or even complaining. My own observation about life trauma leads me to firmly believe that such trauma is the norm rather than the exception. Bergler, I believe, is supportive of this contention.)
Anthony West could probably have easily squeezed Princess Cassamasima into his Mortal Wounds, which book I've just now finished reading. The first half of MW concentrates on Madame de Stael, a woman I knew something about having some years ago read a biography of her by J. Christopher Herold, (first published in the U.S. by Bobbs-Merrill, and later re-released by Time-Life books; which book I found in a used bookstore.....).
Mortal Wounds looks at its three main subjects, (and several others in the postscript), with the help of Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis. (If that seems at first glance somewhat "middlebrow", well, chew that around on your own, my thinking is that T.A. has been well vetted.) Half of the book is taken up by Madame de Stael, the other half devoted to Madame de Charriere and then George Sand, with a Postscript that looks at D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Proust through the same lens. That all the subjects have life scripts and play roles and do transactions I won't dispute, but I would say that laying the blueprint of T.A. over the twists and turns of any novel, as helpful as it might be, and I found it to be enlightening and entertaining, and I still am impressed with Anthony West, I think that the finished work of art, novel, short story in the same way as sculpture and painting, has to submit to more than that one critique, even if you do leave out Structuralist, Deconstruction and all that French stuff. Content in itself is endless, not to mention the poetic, the spiritual, the philosophical, (he does get into Bergson where he kind of barks up the wrong tree), ......I'm sure that while writing this book Mom's work was never far from his mind, and I'm sure that he dug around and found pathology in all of her work, being one of her toughest critics. But there's no mention of Mom here.
Note to self: You are on a book-ban until you finish at least half of the twenty unfinished books you've bought recently; that's as of 6Nov19. Signed, Me.
Confession- I have violated the book-ban 3 times, Father; bless me for I have sinned. Felt compelled to buy a Kindle version of Philistines at the Hedge-Row, to re-read; as well as Lisa Chaney's bio of J.M. Barrie, Hide and Seek with Angels. Still, the ban is still in effect, or is it affect, although tainted.
Continuing to break the book-ban...latest is Birds Fall Down, (by R.W.), which I HAD to buy because it was recommended by Carl Rollyson who's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West was another book-ban casualty... Which brings us to today, 12/23/19. By the way, Merry Christmas!
Let me just say here that I don't seem to have much ambition towards book reviewing, something I've noticed just recently while perusing some of the reviews on Goodreads. (I've done a few Goodreads reviews myself but more on that later.) There are many awful ones and some great ones and some that are partly good. I read one just now about "Cassamasima" which I liked and which lets the reader know how good the descriptive parts are. I'll just agree with that reviewer. What I'm more interested in here is why I am drawn to the story, which is, pure and simply, the seduction. Hyacinth is seduced by an impossibly beautiful aristocrat who is the wife of an Italian, [is he Italian?] Prince, whom she has abandoned, for I guess, matters of mental cruelty or something. Our boy has recently been drawn in to a small circle of radical leftists who believe that The Revolution is at hand. And so I guess you could say that Hyacinth "stumbles" across this wealthy aristocrat who also happens to be a believer in this Just Cause.
Like Hyacinth, over the course of my long and arduous life I have stumbled across, and found quite seductive, more than one, perhaps I could say several women who in the culture in which I have lived could be considered each in her own way aristocrats; members of the privileged upper class. Like any culture of any size, like say 19th c. England or France, my 20th Century America had many kinds of upper class. Those included the Catholic, the Jewish, the WASP, the Progressive Left Wing cultural elite; all of which had their own Country Clubs, except the Left Wing, which had PEN as its international club, and included for community The New School in NYC, the Guild Hall, in East Hampton, and a long list of other appurtenances. I have been writing about these adventures in an as yet uncompleted manuscript with working title Hold On, for a decade or two, and expect to have said manuscript cremated along with my remains when it comes to that.
On a related front, Anthony West has become my new best friend. I suppose it doesn't hurt that he's dead. He's unlikely to become a pest. But there's no doubt I didn't stumble across him by accident. I read his mother's great book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb Grey Falcon some thirty years ago, partly because I was reacting emotionally to my father's recent death, and partly because I had evolved into a sort of connoisseur of especially good non-fiction. And once I had read that very long book I sort of realized that I was in a committed relationship with Rebecca West, to the point where I'd begun calling her Rebecca. (Her really close friends called her Cicily.)
I've written briefly about Rebecca and Anthony's lifelong love-hate relationship with each other in another post on this blog and I would like to add that I'm unaware of any book that does justice to that long battle. It would have to be someone with the attitude of a conscientious and fair referee. Anthony was no slouch; he didn't just ride along on the coattails of his famous parents. Like his parents he didn't go to college. Unlike either parent, he started with a non-literary career, cattle farming. Eventually, though, with the help of what I expect was an autodidactic impulse, he began writing. And, eventually, he ended up in the U.S., writing reviews for The New Yorker, where he stayed for the rest of his life, living not far from this writer, on Fisher's Island, and later Stonington, Connecticut.
O. K., let me not get away from my attachment to mother and son. I've confessed to being in love with Rebecca, in the only way that one can be with someone who is in the Spirit World, and I've admitted a similar attachment to the son, also long gone from the material world; his being my new best friend. Therefore, I must insist that I am not conflicted on this cause. I can handle it.
I've examined at some length over my lifetime my own neurotic baggage from a childhood of having been raised by two narcissistic artists who, in laying their personalities and their relationship fireworks on me caused unavoidable covert incest [psychological, not literal] damage to be inflicted on my over-sensitive pre-adolescent psyche. (About which I hasten to add I am not whining or even complaining. My own observation about life trauma leads me to firmly believe that such trauma is the norm rather than the exception. Bergler, I believe, is supportive of this contention.)
Anthony West could probably have easily squeezed Princess Cassamasima into his Mortal Wounds, which book I've just now finished reading. The first half of MW concentrates on Madame de Stael, a woman I knew something about having some years ago read a biography of her by J. Christopher Herold, (first published in the U.S. by Bobbs-Merrill, and later re-released by Time-Life books; which book I found in a used bookstore.....).
Mortal Wounds looks at its three main subjects, (and several others in the postscript), with the help of Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis. (If that seems at first glance somewhat "middlebrow", well, chew that around on your own, my thinking is that T.A. has been well vetted.) Half of the book is taken up by Madame de Stael, the other half devoted to Madame de Charriere and then George Sand, with a Postscript that looks at D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Proust through the same lens. That all the subjects have life scripts and play roles and do transactions I won't dispute, but I would say that laying the blueprint of T.A. over the twists and turns of any novel, as helpful as it might be, and I found it to be enlightening and entertaining, and I still am impressed with Anthony West, I think that the finished work of art, novel, short story in the same way as sculpture and painting, has to submit to more than that one critique, even if you do leave out Structuralist, Deconstruction and all that French stuff. Content in itself is endless, not to mention the poetic, the spiritual, the philosophical, (he does get into Bergson where he kind of barks up the wrong tree), ......I'm sure that while writing this book Mom's work was never far from his mind, and I'm sure that he dug around and found pathology in all of her work, being one of her toughest critics. But there's no mention of Mom here.
Note to self: You are on a book-ban until you finish at least half of the twenty unfinished books you've bought recently; that's as of 6Nov19. Signed, Me.
Confession- I have violated the book-ban 3 times, Father; bless me for I have sinned. Felt compelled to buy a Kindle version of Philistines at the Hedge-Row, to re-read; as well as Lisa Chaney's bio of J.M. Barrie, Hide and Seek with Angels. Still, the ban is still in effect, or is it affect, although tainted.
Continuing to break the book-ban...latest is Birds Fall Down, (by R.W.), which I HAD to buy because it was recommended by Carl Rollyson who's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West was another book-ban casualty... Which brings us to today, 12/23/19. By the way, Merry Christmas!
