Archive for the ‘Washington Square’ Category

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

August 20, 2009
Washington, DC

washingtonsquarenorthweb
“Washington Square North, nos. 121-125, Manhattan.”
Abbott, Berenice — Photographer. 1935-1938, printed 1935-ca. 1990
from The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
 

Most people have heard about the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James. But it turns out that Cynthia Ozick has also spent a great deal of time keeping company with our resident expat bachelor. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Ms. Ozick on “the marvels” of Washington Square.

[T]here’s not surprise in this novel, and that’s one of the surprises in this novel, that there’s no surprise.  That [Morris Townsend] comes on to begin with as somebody who has his eye on a dull but very rich girl, and it ends that way.  And nothing has changed in between the beginning and the end of the book, except the transformation of Catherine who, to begin with, has been transformed from dullness into a sense of her own worth, her own actual beauty, herself, really, as a work of art. . . . And later, she becomes transformed from a humble, obedient girl, into a hard, sarcastic, unkind simulacru and echo of her father.

So, although nothing changes, everything has changed, because if Catherine is the focal point of the novel, and the change takes place in her, then this novel, which is seemingly about no change, is about enormous change, but in one person only.  And that is one of the marvels of [Washington Square]. 

There [is also] the dialogue, which you can reread and reread and study and study, and see that every sentence in a passage is crucial to the next sentence.  Each sentence creates the succeeding sentence, and it’s always with extreme wit, extreme insight, and moving the story another notch forward. 

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, May 15th, 2009

May 15, 2009
Washington, DC

Yesterday, the Arts Endowment announced 11 new NEA National Heritage Fellows , the best of the best of the nation’s artists working in the folk and traditional arts. Tradition is at the heart of many of the Big Read titles, from the rigid etiquette of “Old New York” in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s Washington Square to the immigrant traditions that permeate Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. In the following literary moment, 2006 NEA National Heritage Fellow Charles M. Carrillo, a New Mexican anthropologist and santero (a carver and painter of images of saints), discusses one of the many traditional beliefs at the heart of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

 April 15, 2009
Washington, DC

Happy Birthday Henry James! To celebrate here’s fellow Big Read author Cynthia Ozick’s take on Washington Square (from the Reader’s Guide to Washington Square).

“Washington Square is about people who pretend to be what they are not. This is a book about lies, people who lie about themselves and about other people. It’s also a novel about the abuse of imagination, the abuse of trust, the abuse of propriety and form; about, above all, the absence of pity.”

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The Big Read’s Teenage Reading Survey, Part II

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

July 23, 2007
Washington, DC

While tabulating responses to our survey of teenagers’ favorite books, I’ve been thinking what I’d do if I ever found myself in front of a teenage English class for a semester — besides panic, that is. This is where my trusty know-it-all megalomania comes in handy. Here, drawing on all the classroom expertise that seven years as newspaperman and two as an arts administrator have afforded me, is my notion:

On the first day of class, I’d challenge each student to name a book he likes. No fudging, no sucking up, just any book. Gatsby, Danielle Steele, X-Men — I don’t care. Each kid’s first assignment would just be to tell the class why they ought to read it too, thereby helping develop those powers of argumentation. Then the class votes, and whichever book polls highest becomes the first assignment on an otherwise blank syllabus. (So it’s an alternative school, OK? Work with me.)

Say the class picks some Robert Ludlum thriller. Onto the syllabus it goes. The class reads it, I read it, the kid who championed it re-reads it. Over a week we talk about whether Ludlum creates suspense effectively or not, whether his characters sound real or don’t, whether he nails the ending or doesn’t, quite.

We now return the class to its regularly scheduled taskmaster, i.e., me. For Lesson 2, I suggest a slightly older, slightly better thriller. Some Frederick Forsyth, maybe, or Michael Crichton’s Binary, written under the pen name John Lange.

Lesson 3: Something short, but with a little more meat on its bones. Maybe John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

Lesson 4: A vintage American mystery, like the Big Read’s own Maltese Falcon.

Lesson 5: A classic proto-thriller, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Lesson 6: The original and still best geopolitical mistaken-identity thriller of all time: A Tale of Two Cities.

This way, we’ve taken them from Robert Ludlum, via Dashiell Hammett, all the way to Dickens in just one semester. Similarly, if the class picks Danielle Steele, maybe regress them through Gone With the Wind to Little Women to Henry James’s Washington Square, which is joining the Big Read in fall 2008. If they pick an X-Men comic, take them back through H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Jules Verne. If they pick Harry Potter, walk them down the years past the Big Read’s A Wizard of Earthsea to The Hobbit.

The point is, let them pick the first book on the syllabus, then follow it back through the genealogy of literature wherever it leads. This way they’ll have a stake in the assigned reading, since they indirectly picked it. Start them cold with Dickens or Alcott, and they might not stick around for Ludlum or Steele.

Believe me, I know how impractical this all is. Feel free to file it under “unsolicited advice, passed along just to vent.” But if somebody had put me on to Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al when I was 8 when Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was my favorite book, I would have discovered classic American literature a whole lot sooner…

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