Hilaire Belloc's Flawed Genius (Contra Calvin Tomkins)

Calvin Tomkins, in his “The Inexplicably Enduring Appeal of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales” (newyorker.com, September 5, 2017), says, “Belloc had the bad luck to mistake himself for a serious writer.” I think Tomkins is the one who’s mistaken. At the level of diction, rhythm, and syntax, Belloc was a genius. Wilfrid Sheed called him “a grand master of language” (The Morning After, 1972). This points us in the right direction. Consider these passages from Belloc's classic 1902 travelogue The Path to Rome:

It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up along the Moselle.

So I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and offered me bread

When I awoke it was full eight o’clock, and the sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches of my tree like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the strength of the sun.

Then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste and folly

There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of Gaul, an island city.

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers.

As this was the first really great height, so this was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining sun and noting all I saw.

When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road.

By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.

For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.

This book is endlessly quotable. Unfortunately, it’s marred by two or three passages of anti-Semitism. Belloc was both a considerable writer and a considerable anti-Semite.

Notes on James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

James Wolcott, in his delectable essay collection Critical Mass, describes John Updike’s Hugging the Shore as being “crammed with goodies.” The same can be said of Critical Mass. One of its most enjoyable aspects is Wolcott’s Kaelesque ability to pin his subjects with arresting, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued appraisals. For example, he says Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “conveys the champagne fizz and sparkle of fashion magazines in the fifties, the infusion of frisky new energy into old money. It’s all surface, but the surface dances.” He calls Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” “a cutthroat string quartet.” He says of William Shawn, “His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle.” Of Norman Mailer: “The crippler is that in his writing Mailer was psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing – a Playboy Bunny mansion of haughty bitches and breathy ditzes whose dialogue bore no resemblance to indoor speech.” On William Styron: “My own problem with Styron’s ennobled potboilers was not his subject matter, point of view, historical accuracy, pale-male effrontery, or any other heavy carbs, but the sheer awful self-conscious succulence of the prose, a fruit-orchard in every scene-painting description.”

Wolcott doesn’t analyze at the level of language the way James Wood does. His hands aren’t as inky with text (to steal a phrase from Wood) as Wood’s are. Both critics are incredible metaphoricists. Wolcott mixes his metaphors more than Wood does. His writing is fizzier, more audacious. In his piece on Marvin Mudrick, Wolcott says that Mudrick “turned litcrit into a spinoff of stand-up comedy.” The same can be said of Wolcott. Like Kael, he’s a master of the parenthetical wisecrack. His inspired “Ved, have a melon ball,” in “The Love Bug,” makes me laugh every time I read it.

Reading Wolcott, I’m sometimes reminded of Wilfrid Sheed, except he doesn’t treat criticism as a game the way Sheed did. Sheed’s reviews were all about how witty he could be. Wolcott is more attentive to his subject, more descriptive. When he’s really digging his material, he can strike some wonderfully surprising, surreal word combos. Consider this beauty from Wolcott’s superb “Manny Farber’s Termite Art” (included in Critical Mass):  

His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder’s blobby corpus that what’s left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla.

When was the last time you saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Hershey’s chocolate,” “R. W. Fassbinder,” “blobby corpus,” “toilets,” “telephone cord,” “empty bed,” “giant beer bottle,” “magazine spread,” and “Hanna Schygulla” conjoined in the same sentence? I’ll bet, never. It’s the prose equivalent of a ravishing Rauschenberg combine. I love it.

Wolcott doesn’t treat Capote and Cheever as failed saints the way (say) Daniel Mendelsohn and Colm Tóibín do. “Liar,” “failure,” “snob,” “drunk” occur so often in Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show” (included in his How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008) and Tóibín’s “My God, the Suburbs” (London Review of Books, November 5, 2009), I found myself thinking, these guys enjoy using these words. It’s tonic to read Wolcott’s Capote and Cheever pieces because he avoids Mendelsohn’s and Tóibín’s moralizing, prosecutorial approach. Wolcott relishes Capote’s and Cheevers’s complex, tormented personalities. He says of Capote:

For many, the fizzle of Answered Prayers and his personal tailspin offer a spectacle more engrossing than the arc of a distinguished life. A dignified exit may be desirable in principle, but if you can have your subject bumming around in his bathrobe in public, then you’ve got yourself a Cautionary Tale. There but for the grace of God and an empty liquor cabinet go I.

On Cheever, he writes:

Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow.

I agree. The essence of being human is that we screw up. I applaud Wolcott’s humanism (and humor). Dan and Colm, have a melon ball.