Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance, 1998
Whatever makes events into a story is entirely missing from what follows. It may well be that what urges me to preserve these events in the way I have — the only way I could — is exactly what stops them becoming a story.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
“It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. . . . I wrote it and left it out.”
“Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.
David Wyatt, Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion
These cuts indicate a will to have the text of the memeoir [A Moveable Feast] conform to the strictures of Hemingway’s early art of the omitted rather than to allow it to deploy the more expansive, meditative, and self-accusing quality of the later work.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway did at times maintain that he was still trying “to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged, by the man who writes it,by the excellence of the material he eliminates.” In such a formulation, cutting is embraced as part of the writing rather than the editorial process. It is an act committed by a writer as he writes, not by an editor after the fact.
My review of Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else by C.D. Rose. The Irish Times, 1 September 2018, p. 32.
Is C.D. Rose an elaborate literary hoax? Some have harboured suspicions ever since he “edited” The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (2014) chronicling the fate of obscure scribes, who, on closer inspection, all turned out to be fictional. The provocative title of his debut novel, Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else, lets the (Cheshire) cat out of the bag.
A suspiciously anonymous protagonist doubles up — like so many other things in this tale of doppelgängers and mistaken identities — as a remarkably reliable narrator who conceals his storytelling talents behind apologetic asides to the reader (the storyline is far less digressive than he makes out). Following the “modest success” of a book he edited — yes, the aforementioned Biographical Dictionary — he is invited to deliver a series of 10 lectures on lost or forgotten works in an unspecified provincial city, somewhere in central Europe. The stage is set for a campus caper in Kafkaland that reads, at times, like a David Lodge revisited by Umberto Eco.
When he sets foot in his cramped hotel room — dominated by an oversized Narnia-like wardrobe — the narrator senses that he is “somewhere just not quite right”, signalling that he has stepped through the looking-glass into a recognisable, yet subtly defamiliarised, world. After all, what is this “cupboard within a cupboard” if not a mise en abyme — the space of fiction squared, which is that of literature itself?
The uncanniness of the hotel room spreads to the labyrinthine city, which seems expressly “designed to lose oneself in”, geometry being a “loose concept” in these Expressionistic climes. Roaming the streets, the narrator has the distinct feeling of being preceded (rather than followed) as though haunted by the anxiety of influence or trapped in someone else’s narrative. It transpires that the ever-elusive Professor, who (supposedly) invited him in the first place, is dead — having probably been eliminated as part of a sinister plot to eradicate literature. Unbeknown to him, the narrator has been enrolled in the resistance due to his faith in Maxim Guyavitch, a cult author who wrote very little and whose very existence is contested.
Who’s Who is a book lover’s book, as well as a comic gem. Its palimpsestic quality is obvious from the italicised opening paragraphs, which are meant to be an excerpt from a potboiler the narrator is trying (and failing) to read on the train. Later, the discovery of a volume — which may or may not be a lost Guyavitch — is savoured like a fine vintage: “It gave off an odour of ferns, of waxy newness with an undertow of body musk”. The lectures that interrupt the frame narrative at regular intervals (the last one is left blank in homage to Tristram Shandy) allow the author to produce pastiches of various genres ranging from magic realism to folk horror. Most of the authors on whose fake works he then offers a mock-academic excursus exist — insofar as they are figments of other writers’ imaginations. Enoch Soames, for instance, comes from Max Beerbohm, Vilém Vok from Enrique Vila-Matas, Silas Flannery from Italo Calvino, Maurice Bendrix from Graham Greene and Herbert Quain from Borges.
It is the latter, of course, who advocated summarising or critiquing books instead of going to all the trouble of composing them. Writing about fictitious or lost works (both in this case) is a means of holding literature in abeyance; of preserving its potentiality. This is as close as we can get to fiction’s “strange kind of utopia”.
As for the author? C.D. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
My review of The Story of “The Face”: The Magazine That Changed Culture by Paul Gorman. The Times Literary Supplement, 24 & 31 August 2018, p. 43.
Paul Gorman’s The Story of “The Face” charts the rise and fall of the original style magazine, from its launch, on a shoestring, in 1980, to 1999, when it was sold off by its founder to a publishing giant. Nick Logan’s monthly would only survive five more years in the brave new digital world it had foreshadowed with its kaleidoscopic cultural coverage. Right from the start, The Face proved a victim of its own success. Having identified style as the prism through which to observe the zeitgeist — thereby eliding the distinction between men and women’s magazines — it soon spawned a host of imitators, not least among the Sunday supplements. At one stage, art director Neville Brody was producing a brand new typeface for every issue, in a frenetic bid to remain one step beyond.
This coffee-table book, with its hundreds of lavishly reproduced covers and innovative page layouts, does full justice to the “world’s best-dressed magazine”. Flicking through it, one witnesses The Face’s visual identity gradually shifting away from radical graphic design towards slick era-defining photography. The Story of The Face is a paean to its founder who, the author contends, has been airbrushed out of history. Logan’s fascination with the intersection between pop music and street style was rooted in his days as a young mod in the 1960s, which the title of his prime publication would allude to (a face being a top mod). After working for the local press, he graduated to the New Musical Express where he became editor at the age of twenty-six, in 1973, presiding over what was arguably the paper’s most important period. He left, following a breakdown, subsequently launching the hugely successful Smash Hits aimed at the post-punk teenybopper market.
The Face was ahead of its time, but also very much of it. The inaugural issue was even delayed by a printers’ strike. Although he knew that the Two Tone phenomenon had already peaked, Logan insisted on putting a picture of The Specials’ Jerry Dammers on the cover as the band typified the marriage of street style and popular music he intended to explore. In a landmark piece published a couple of years later, Robert Elms observed that youth culture now represented “not a rebellion but a tradition” — one, he may have sensed, that was drawing to a close. The days of the austerity dandies who, devoid of job or future, fashioned themselves into extravagant works of art, were numbered. Never again would style have so much substance. The Face chronicled the end of an era as much as it ushered in a new one, endowing its early strapline — “rock’s final frontier” — with a presciently valedictory tone.
My short review of Paul Gorman‘s excellent The Story of “The Face”: The Magazine That Changed Culture features in the latest issue of The Times Literary Supplement, 24 & 31 August 2018, p. 43.
Here’s an extract:
. . . The Face was ahead of its time, but also very much of it. The inaugural issue was even delayed by a printers’ strike. Although he knew that the Two Tone phenomenon had already peaked, Logan insisted on putting a picture of The Specials’ Jerry Dammers on the cover as the band typified the marriage of street style and popular music he intended to explore. In a landmark piece published a couple of years later, Robert Elms observed that youth culture now represented “not a rebellion but a tradition” — one, he may have sensed, that was drawing to a close. The days of the austerity dandies who, devoid of job or future, fashioned themselves into extravagant works of art, were numbered. Never again would style have so much substance. The Face chronicled the end of an era as much as it ushered in a new one, endowing its early strapline — “rock’s final frontier” — with a presciently valedictory tone.
The book I’m editing, We’ll Never Have Paris, published by Repeater Books early next year, will include more than 70 of the best, most adventurous writers in the English language. It now has a cover. More soon.
Saul Leiter
Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.
