My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant misery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and then the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number of places.  I had planned to breeze through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River (1942) but that will have to wait.  “For Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught.  A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of the Howard Greenblatt translation). The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast, a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The Sword in the Stone.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original. The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American couple tourist around Morocco after the war.  The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not.  The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I was fine.  Existentialism can seem awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real problem working through the ideas become interesting.  All this before the last section, the last 40 pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel.  “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’ but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91)  That’s how I felt! I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form the 1940s seriously.  See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”  I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was exactly as relevant as it has always been.  The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy.  What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!” (1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.  In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains.  I had not realized how young Asimov was when he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories.  If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate, well. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith – A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these other books. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell – Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else. ’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust.  I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with.  He used to be very handsome, and so amusing.  He looked wonderful on a horse.  He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya.  Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89) Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever mentioned again in the novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia Ozick Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short, sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey.  Expect more donkey content here over the next few months. When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so painful in places.  Joy has recently discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one in France.  He is joining a sadly well established American literary tradition.   HISTORY 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.    POETRY The Far Field (1964) & Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing. Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major work.  I think I will revisit it next year when the paperback is published.  Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I thought his voice was individual.  A long poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be translated; it all should be translated.  I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders.  I have no idea how, or how often, this book is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th graders are assigned such a complex book of poems. Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942), Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden shifts in register, hard as the devil.  Sometimes it felt like I was reading a Godard film. Roberte ce soir (1954) & La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre Klossowski – Two odd novellas.  The wife sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good idea.  Each novella has one long scene that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register.  The second book turns the first inside out, which is interesting.  Perhaps those ridiculous sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies.  One curious scene describes a painting that could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus.  Utterly different style than Queneau but just as difficult.  I need to find an easy French book, a Simenon novel, something like that. Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them. Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong. Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings. Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth. Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator. Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember. Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good. The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting. The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone. Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume. The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one. The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish. Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.”  Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge! The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge! Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance. A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were. The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters. What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare. I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while since I have read them, twenty years or more.  Plays are well-suited for ongoing readalongs, so in the spirit of reading the Greek and Roman plays a couple years ago, why not invite anyone interested to join in. I have been calling this idea Not Shakespeare.  What am I trying to do? 1.  The plays are so good.  Many of them.  I want to read them again. 2.  I want to learn more about the technical aspects of the innovations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, especially the poetry and structure.  Things moved very fast for forty years. 3.  Genre, too, which appears to be where a lot of the academic attention has gone (as with fiction generally).  It is here that I am most tempted to read bad plays, and not just revenge tragedies, for which I have a strong taste. 4. I want to put a personality of some kind on more of these writers.  Some of them are easy.  Just read The Duchess of Malfi and you know John Webster well enough to get Tom Stoppard’s jokes about him in Shakespeare in Love.  I think I know Marlowe and Jonson.  But other major writers are ciphers, Thomas Middleton especially.  I don’t know if the answer is to read more of the writer, read more about the writer, or think more about them.  I hope not the latter.  I should say I mean know them as artists, not whether or not they were nice people.  Maybe I should also say that this is all a fiction, a creative collaboration between the writer and the reader. Still, Middleton, who was that guy?  If you have read a lot of Shakespeare you have likely read a lot more Middleton than you realize.  A good fifth item for this list would be to learn more about how these writers collaborated, but I fear that is hopeless.  We wish we knew.  The computer programs can only get us so far. The logistics of Not Shakespeare are a little different than the Greek plays.  The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are longer and the English is more difficult than the modern translated English I read with the Greeks.  A play a week with the Greeks, but I think a play every two weeks makes more sense with the Not Shakespeares.  Plus that will give me more time to read other things.  The poetry of the time – John Donne, George Herbert, the sonnet craze, much more – is also tempting me.  And I want to read some secondary works, although how far that will go I do not know. It is tempting, and likely best for a readalong, to read the Twenty Greatest Hits.  But I want to go a little deeper.  How about twenty Elizabethan plays to begin, actually Elizabethan, stopping in 1603?  Marlowe, The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson finding his voice, new genres, many crazy revenge tragedies. My method was to see what New Mermaids has in print, and then poke around at Broadview and Penguin Classics, and then add this and that.  George Chapman and John Fletcher seem to be out of fashion in the classroom for some reason. Twenty Elizabethan plays in forty weeks, beginning in September, how does that sound?  In August I will rewrite this post and put up a timeline.  I do not expect anyone to read all, or most, of the plays.  Someone may well be inspired to read Shakespeare rather than Not Shakespeare, which is understandable. I am asking for advice in some sense.  Don’t miss this play; that Cambridge Companion is the really good one; so-and-so’s essay is way better than T. S. Eliot’s.  I don’t know.  Anything.  This is also a method to make myself write more.  For some reason a committed structure, however artificial, does the trick.

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishing, writes a novel, gets a girlfriend, gets a job as a script writer, splits with the girlfriend, and writes another novel or two, none of which, except for getting the girlfriend, is depicted in the first four novels of A Dance to the Music of Time.  Instead, in long scenes, four or five chapters in a 200 page novel, Nick goes to parties or lunches or perhaps a bunch of characters pile into a car and drive around.  All of the school and jobs and even losing the girlfriend happens between the parties. Meeting characters in different social situations is the structural basis of Anthony Powell’s novel, perhaps even its metaphysics, the governing principle of the fictional universe: He had cropped up in my life before, and, if I considered him at all as a recurrent factor, I should have been prepared to admit that he might crop up again. (A Buyer’s Market, 1, 29) I had the idea that characters were going to recur in surprising situations, but at this point there is no surprise. I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides – or rather Mildred Haycock – might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette.  But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention.  Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.  This was just such a performance.  The fiancé was…  (At Lady Molly’s, 1, 42) But I am in the fourth novel here, so the surprise would be if the much younger, much gossiped over fiancé were not “the horribly memorable Kenneth Widmerpool” who has been the “recurrent factor” since the third chapter of the first novel.  I will be shocked if a novel goes by without Widmerpool.  John Banville is the source of “horribly memorable,” and also “in all his egregious awfulness,” but at this point Widmerpool, a narrow, clumsy social striver, is not quite awful.  He strives towards awfulness but does not seem quite competent enough to reach it.  I will enjoy seeing his awfulness increase as the series progresses.  Some people think of him as one of the great comic characters of English fiction, although at this point he is more like Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle than Waugh’s Basil Seal.  Now that is a character with some egregious awfulness. Please search that Banville review for Waugh.  Since I brought up the subject, let’s have some samples of Powell’s style.  This is Widmerpool, from above: Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored and unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. (ALM, 1, 42) Widmerpool generally has (we are two full novel earlier) a “piscine cast of countenance, projecting the impression that he swam, rather than walked, through the rooms he haunted” (ABM, 1, 28).  Powell’s metaphors are specific and imaginative, among the greatest pleasures of the novels: “He made a sweeping movement with his hands, as if driving chickens before him in a farmyard…” (A Question of Upbringing, 4, 189). It is unlikely that many people, writing up their life, would remember such a thing, but that is Nick.  I do not have to suspend disbelief; our narrator is the rare bird who would remember this detail when writing his memoir twenty-five years after the fact.  He is a stylist, a fussy one – I believe some of the fussiness is visible in the quotations I have used – hardly as original as Waugh or his friend Henry Green but attentive.  Some of his aphoristic lines seem blatantly wrong.  But the sensibility is Powell’s own.  The sensibility, and the sentences, keep me reading, and will likely keep me interested through the twelfth novel.