Book Group: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" - Discussion Thread

Yes. So excited to see this. Although I still wish that YOUR NAME HERE would get a proper release.

Amazon says this is 13 stories. I assume short stories. If so, I’m curious whether this collects her short stories that have already been published but in difficult to access literary journals, etc, or whether this is all new material.

i did write to hdw about your name here and she responded giving a number of reasons why it wasn’t available. publisher reluctance in various forms - “too adventurous for a mainstream publisher” was what she was told, infuriatingly.

she did also say it was a collaboration and that people never read it as such, but as a piece by her, which she didn’t want. also, she said if she had known how it wd turn out she probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

it sounds - as often with her - there’s a lot of complexity. i wish her life was easier! sounds like she had a bad year last year as well (from her most recent blog post).

"Novelist Helen DeWitt describes her new book, Some Trick, as a story collection preoccupied with 'the cussedness of talent.' Below, the author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods recommends books that illuminate the workings of singular minds."

only read three of these, the tufte, and transfiguration of the commonplace, which is wonderful, and against the gods, which is also excellent.

Collection is out next week; my friend who subscribes to more periodicals than I do says she’s been popping up a bunch so it seems like her PR is doing their job. I’m excited and I hope people buy it.

not until the 26th June in the U.K. apparently ffs.

so I read Some Trick, and i'm just going to chuck some stuff down about it, because although i've got plenty of unresolved thoughts about it, if i try and do anything more cogent i won't get it down. if this were an essay i would probably title it from a line in the last story Entourage - "Umlauts up the gazoo". Most of the stories are in the recent HdW manner - content and style. Content: obsessional application of theoretical if not mathematical models to creative or artistic problems, and the absurdity of progressing from a reasonable point via reason to an eccentric point. Style: dry, laconic authorial control, generally indirect free speech, that is to say third person heavily laced with the expressions and thinking and reasoning of her enthusiastic and excitable characters or doubtful pragmatic characters. Managing the filo thin layers of control, voice and irony (rationality, sympathy, humour, contempt, enthusiasm, tragedy) so that both the dexterity and a unity of HdW 'voice' is apparent is one of the main thrills of reading her, aside from the content (tho the unexpected juxtapositions and logic of that content is very much part of that layering. To expand on that, the mathematical, rational 'mode' which drives the direction of many stories, is absolutely a voice, a layer, a structure.

There is a sprinkling of stories from her time at Oxford in 1985. These are different in style. Clearly more juvenile works, less tight in style, more juvenile in their expression of cleverness (of course another excitement of HdW is the cleverness). Their subject is often an intelligent female voice existing in a pragmatic, wry and doubtful space created by forceful or dullard men, or just men who aren't as clever as they think they are. These are less successful, I think, though Famous Last Words is very enjoyable.

It does raise the question of why these are collected here in this way. It's not, as far as I can tell, a retrospective or collection as such. The collection has a good, elliptical poem as an epigraph.

Next time someone tells you desire
Is a trick of grammnar
Tell him
If what I have is what I said I wanted
It's not what I wanted
I know what I want
But I don't know its name

and later

Some trick

So using this, and the title, to try and draw things together a bit:

[*]It's a trick of stories in the card-playing sense there are thirteen, and i'm not sure whether there is an interrelation or symbolism relating to that at play – nothing jumped out at my, but I'm afraid to say some of my reading was a little inattentive (tipsy on tube or interrupted by things, and just generally i haven't felt as sharp recently as i'd like to be). I might need to look at that again.

[*]It's the trick of grammar, of letters, of foreign words and foreign mores creating and canalising desire: (Brutto about an Italian art dealer's enthusiasm for an incredibly ugly suit ('ma che brutto!') an artist made in her sempstress training.

[*]It's the trick of managing artistic control for the vision you want in a world that is trying through enthusiasm, fandom or lack of understanding to grasp hold of that indifferent to the things that make important to its creator.

[*]It's very much the calculus of money and creativity – something that affects Helen de Witt directly.

And in fact it seemed to me that a motive behind this collection may have been to keep some money coming in. She is clearly struggling in the way that many of the artists in her stories struggle - artistic/typographic/visual control, and money.

There are odd linkages and abuttments between the stories: the name (the character?) Gil, Stanisław Lem's Robot stories - these may form little 'tricks' of stories, within the overall hand.

Nothing here as good as The Sexual Codes of the Europeans.

Ticks of her style jump out, or rather the style of the types of people with which she populates her stories, become very obvious - the emphasis of speech with italics, and capitisation and so. many. exclamation marks!!!!!

Is this a problem or not? I don't know. I came to the conclusion not particularly, given that these stories are about a certain type of person, but, well, that certain type of person, the logic of their mind and their manner, is also Helen de Witt's area of concern – they and their thinking is her subject matter. It's noticeable anyway, across compressed short stories. I found the patterns of speech in two English rock band stories quite painful, and the stories not the best in the collection, and given the tight integration of conceptually diverse objects is one of her 'tricks', that is a problem.

Occasionally I found the compression of her style confounded meaning. tho as i say, i wasn't always reading as attentively as i might have done. It does occur to me that at these moments of extreme compression language, or rather an language as an arrangement of letters, becomes as much about texture as content (something made explicit in the final story, Entourage.

However, there's a load to delight in here: Brutto, My Heart Belongs to Bertie, The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto, and Entourage, Famous Last Words.

I also went back and read some of the stories immediately on finishing them. There is just something about her writing that I find utterly compelling (I almost said something about her 'style' but as I say, it is also the content, and the interplay of the two, though even that is too formalist a framing of it).

What’s that epigraph from?! It’s great.

it's her own poem – so i guess not really an epigraph. 'introductory poem' would have been better. that's just a part of it – it toys around with The Wizard of Oz (the last line is 'because because because because because') and absences, the way... well, i thought i had the knack of it the first time I read it, but I can't remember what i thought it was about:

'What would you do with a heart but try not to hurt?'
The Tin Man hadn't the heart to disappoint him.
He thanked him.
'I feel nothing,' he thought.
'But I wouldn't hurt a Behaviourist.'

there's a thing in the book that maps onto this – which is people coming with incoherent or received thinking and feeling, and the narrator (usually) being doubtful, polite, or cheerful - not really having a heart as such, but still human enough - examining the problem with statistics, or probability, or some obsessive rationale and working it through in a way that doesn't conform to the received feelings, but often helps, and HdW's characters often want to help – they're very good natured (that's not always a good thing). Here that's the Tin Man saying well I haven't got a heart, but you know, I'll do my best here. HdW's characters are often like the Wizard of Oz characters.

and that mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom. that it provides the tools and the experience that we lazily construct received notions of heart, feeling, desire to. sorry, feeling my away around, not very cogently. I am also being laboured – the progress of these people is funny as they hit up against the world's conventions, but the humour is generous to them, caustic to the conditions, wry at the interaction.

What of Dorothy in the poem? That's the last part:

But Dorothy? I don't BELIEVE Judy Garland could fake it.
I think she was glad Technicolor was only a dream
Glad to find she had never left home
Glad to wake up in black and white

Because because because because because

let me rewrite that terrible paragraph - i don't think it actually makes a *load* of sense but the least I can do is make the words into sentences:

mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life, is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom, received thinking. we lazily find our way through our feelings, the world, with metaphor and loose-ish psychology. that mathematical reasoning provides the tools to see those aspects of us and the world in a way that is slightly strange, clarified by not being muddled up with conventional thinking, and still recognisably human (ie not rationality as applied by forceful wielders of 'reason' but as an exploratory toolkit).

Great stuff Fizzles and roundly otm I think, wish I had the wherewithal to respond in depth but it’s not that kind of weekend

need to read more HdW

thanks silby - if you do get the time to respond in depth it would great to hear your thoughts.

feel i need a conversation to knock the coarse-grained and slightly random thoughts in shape.

Very much agree, great stuff: my own reading of this collection left me feeling that I loved 2/3 of it, and the remaining 1/3 of it left me feeling how dramatically much more intelligent Helen deWitt is than me. THis is not a criticism in any way: I'd rather have fiction that stretches and boggles the mind than not, even if it doesn't all land perfectly.

^ otm

Was considering Some Trick again yesterday. Thinking about one of the 'rock and roll' stories, which, although it feels like it contains plenty that's interesting, produced several cringes – english accent, portrayal of 'rock and roll' behaviour, description of music.

A question that comes out of that is whether the other areas she portrays – classical pianist, fashion, new york boho life – are equivalently cringeworthy for someone close to them, and if so whether it matters. Part of the humour of her stories is a flattening out thru repetition and stylisation of the manner of her characters, so some unnatural stylisation is to be expected. More, all these stories are about transactions and trade offs (and have that in common with The Sexual Codes of the Europeans which otherwise wouldn't have fitted well in this selection.

She is looking at the exchange rate or the transaction between artistic integrity and its consumption, or more accurately the mechanisms and models by which it is made available for consumption. In order to do that she has to portray a common ground or create a space where this transaction can be seen to take place. That may be a cafe, it may be email, or verbal communication. That's obv also where the conflict will take place. It's also about the instruments that those people use to communicate that transaction – a card game (in that rock and roll piece), the visual presentation of chance (Bertie) for example.

To finish that thought, I think the disfluency of style or cringe is interesting but not a problem generally.

Tomorrow: how do you solve a financial problem like HdW.

I want to be her unpaid intern for life tbh

well i'm not sure she wouldn't accept that dangerous offer, silby.

as she mentions at the end of Some Trick there are people around who like her work well enough to want to try and support her generally in a way that will allow her to write more, and extends slightly further than the buy me a coffee page she has.

the challenge is that i think she sees anything that isn't writing the sort of thing that she wants to write as opportunity cost, lost time, a serious and unwelcome distraction no different from any other distraction from writing. or as she put it

and it seems as though before
anything can happen I need to think about what I would like, what (if
any) rewards I would like to give supporters, and so on. That is,
there's something of an impasse, because I can't think about these
things without neglecting other things that urgently need to be done

i get the feeling that she's probably a fairly inefficient writer, which I don't mean in a bad way, but if she wants to get to the bottom of something she will spend three days on stack overflow doing that. I'm not sure i'd want it any different, given her output is partly predicated on logical loops taken to absurd extremes. but possibly that sort of thing contributes to the list of things that 'urgently need to be done'.

but generally her aversion to anything much more than signing books, as one of the people who is trying to help her said, makes her difficult to help. he initially suggested a Patreon model, but it sounds like anything other than straight funding of her writing in a general way – ie anything like tiering or rewards – is not likely to be amenable.

Now one response to all this is of course a slightly exasperated throwing of hands up in the air. 'God helps those who help themselves' &c (a very Jordan Peterson formulation).

However, given that she is my favourite writer, and given that i think she's doing something substantially interesting and exciting enough to want her to do more of it, or if that's a bit Misery-ish, do more of it in more comfort and security, I'm willing to feel the occasional twinge of exasperation and have a bit of a think about what might be possible.

But that isn't in itself a solution. I did come up with some very scrappy thoughts, which I cobbled together in conversation with the person trying to co-ordinate this.

All my ideas are bad and at best not very likely to be successful. At worse they would be time-consuming and extremely unsuccessful. All of them would require people (not Helen) to work for free, and do that reliably and probably fairly intensively at times.

• Beef up the PayPal donation button and encouragement on her existing blog page. Inevitably this might mean she has to post a bit more on her blog, which has been static. It might at least generate a bit more money.
• A crowdfunding community, with a funding drive that takes place annually. This would – sorry, this might provide a lump sum which would be beneficial. It would not be tied to any particular work in progress. Absolutely no expectations of communication or advance anything. It would need a page, a place for community focus and comment, and someone to administrate the drive. A facebook page is the obvious choice, though I don't know anybody who is ever overjoyed to use Facebook. Her blog site might be another option. This seems unlikely to generate much money.
• A Patreon or something like it, with rewards she felt able to give: autographed books - that's the obvious one isn't it? It's not easy to think of others – a list of prominent funders in the front or back of the book might be one option if the publishers were willing.
• A subscription model, such as Alexander Pope used for the Odyssey and Iliad. A subscription is raised that guarantees the production and purchase of a limited edition book. I'm not entirely serious as it helps to do this in an aristocratic period with lots of wealthy backers and also if you are very well connected to same wealthy backers. This would have to be modernised, with a second publishing phase with an actual publisher, and it's not clear that a publisher would be very pleased at an earlier edition having been released, albeit 'privately'. It's also not clear that any sort of subscription model would generate enough cash for Helen to live on. On the other hand, self-publishing is much easier than it was, especially digitally.
• The release of individual advance-copy chapters or segments of works in progress to sponsors. Again, publishers may not be amused by this. Or perhaps the release of material relevant to, or used in construction of, the book, in catalogue form (pictures, reading lists, scraps of notes etc) - would require some work on Helen's part.

i should also say this problem is more generally obviously applicable. how do you usefully fund people whose work you like in a structurally sustainable enough way for it to have an actually positive effect. Something like Patreon seems to work very well if you have a niche and enthusiastic, and preferable large, fanbase, for instance if you are doing Dr Who fan stuff, but generalists, people working towards smaller audiences, or working on the periphery in some way, will struggle. I know – 'thus it ever was' – and also just chucking people some money is usually the best solution.

anyway, I did think the least I could do was post this on a thread to see whether people have got any ideas. Personally I find it hard to see how any of them can work really, and frankly, I'd be sceptical that even if HdW *did* put a load of effort into a Patreon type approach, that it would have a reward usefully proportionate to the effort.

i'm not really trying to be captain save a helen, there are many worthy, worthier causes, or people closer to home who could do with such effort i know. part of it is also having a bit of a pragmatic think about the economics of writing in the digital age, and artistic creation more generally.

Promising anything "extra" in one of these is a great way to get bogged down in commitments that may cost more than they bring in and distract one from one's actual objective. (Cf. any number of examples.) On the other hand there's maybe not much of an audience if you promise nothing at all. I think better than the "buy me a coffee" model for Helen DeWitt would be a more explicit "let's raise $35,000/yr for Helen DeWitt" framework with progress bars and such that explicitly comes with no "backer reward" other than the assurance that HdW is continuing to work on what she wants to work on.

Though, I emailed her upon reading her author's note and what she said to me was that her biggest obstacle is really finding a publisher who's able and willing to publish her weirder work correctly, and also market the book, rather than (necessarily) get volunteers involved to like do prepress technical work for her pro bono, which is what I thought she was looking for. Even New Directions' Last Samurai had errors. I have done a lot of futzing around with TeX and desktop publishing but I've never Made A Book and I'm probably no better at selling than Helen DeWitt.

right, totally agree. it does strike me she has a rather fractious relationship with publishers (this much could be deduced alone from her writing tbh). and of course having a good relationship with your publishers is usually a good thing.

I don't think she necessarily knows what would be most helpful, and possibly she's thinking there may be solutions that are in fact not really very viable, the actual solutions just having the problem that they're not very desirable.

I'd say the ideal solution is Full Communism but some people will be difficult to work with even under Full Communism

it can't hurt surely.

I want to get that book she cowrote and self-published as a PDF a few years ago, and which now seems to be unavailable from her site. The fact HdW follows me on Twitter is one of my rare achievments.

she didn't seem to feel that had 'worked' apparently, and felt the collaborative aspect of it wasn't fully understood, which made her reluctant to make it available. did seem to imply it might be out again *at some point* when she'd published a few more things.

If that's Your Name Here you're referring to, anyway.

That's the one, thanks.

Your Name Here was contracted to Noemi Press for a very long time, which is why she took it off her website. I haven't seen where she said that it hadn't 'worked'. Did she make those comments while it was stuck in contract hell?

I think Noemi no longer has the rights to it but I'm not sure where it goes from here.

I haven't re-read it in a few years but loved it at the time - it seemed very much like the next step after The Last Samurai. Messier, to be certain, and even less of a traditional story, but filled with a lot of brilliance and excellent and funny and sad writing.

Most of what she's written since has been much more controlled in its voice, imo.

Anyway, I bought it back when it was self-published, and I'm not certain what the legalities are about sharing it privately, but when Last Samurai was out-of-print, HdW's position was that people who bought used copies could donate to her the equivalent of royalties that she would have gotten if it was new, etc.

your favourite wayward dilettante has begun the last samurai. so far so delirious

✔️

as the person who actually started this thread I have to say that i finished it at least six months after the schedule I'd set.

finished the book, that is. i could finish this thread in way less than six months.

Gets off at Farringdon - how like a man

this is some exquisite deep-London humour. i cackled

big takeaway from the first 100 pages: poor Sybilla being the world's best tutor before the noughties tuition boom, she'd have definitely been able to afford ice-cream

holy fuck the yamamoto chapter

i know right

trying think of a more bravura, high-art, firework-laden passage of writing I've read recently; drawing a blank

and to think there's probably more to come

Maybe I should just give up on all the books I’ve been starting lately and just read this again.

most amusingly, that chapter is based on a fictional Sunday Times interview that in reality would have had to span half the paper and been the best thing any print journal has ever contained

helen just has higher standards for everyone I guess

That’s pretty much it yeah

She doesn't lack for astonishing bravura setpieces does she?

While the HC/RD bit (which I haven't even finished yet) is obviously some sort of literary pinnacle, I do feel I should observe that the best bit of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which came out only a few years before, was also a long and dazzlingly fabulistic reported narrative about a couple of scholars (astronomers rather than philologists) involving impromptu flying devices in China and some complex and ambiguous moral lesson. I know I shouldn't compare everything to Pynchon but

Also of COURSE I should have anticipated L's banter with S once he turned 11. Delightful :D

ah man this gets intense

final chapter is perfect, cheers-to-the-rafters stuff. i cried a bit

when Tom Cruise presents the Emperor with Katsumoto's sword? ;_;

holy fuck the yamamoto chapter

― imago, Monday, December 3, 2018 6:40 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

almost halfway through, pretty sure this is the best book i've ever read that's not the magic mountain

part of it is that it kind of feels like a great work of criticism on top of being a novel, so of course i'm extremely taken with it

I should reread sometime next year, especially if a certain career move comes through.

happy to hear you're enjoying the book, Brad :)