#3: Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg

I had a great time reading this book. For one thing, I am a big fan of popular music and this book filled in a big gap in my knowledge. For another, this was the kind of book you come across every once in a while where you feel like you’ve been invited to a party where you get to meet all sorts of wonderful and interesting people and make friends with all of them. The authors say in their acknowledgements that “the Original Carter Family … gave few interviews, kept no diaries, wrote few letters, and saved almost no correspondence.” But there are plenty of people still alive who knew the original Carters, and their children and grandchildren continue (to various degrees) the family business that the originals—A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and his sister-in-law, Maybelle Carter—started. My theory is that the authors talked to so many people who were quite glad to remember and cherish their famous ancestors that the gracious and warm tone of these many conversations permeates the book itself. It’s a happy book.

Having said that, I would imagine that the lives of those original Carters were probably no happier than the average person’s. For one thing, A.P. and Sara Carter divorced in 1936 when he was 45 and she 35. She had fallen in love with a cousin whom A.P. had asked to chauffeur her around. The original Carters continued to tour and occasionally perform together for another seven years—the book does make clear that the cash flow the Carters realized from their music put them way beyond what their neighbors and relatives in Maces Spring, Virginia, could ever hope for. After 1943 A.P. and Sara dropped out—he returned to Virginia to putter around for the remaining 17 years of his life, and she moved to California to live with her second husband. The remaining third of the original trio, Maybelle, brought her daughters Helen, June, and Anita into the group and kept the act going another 15 years or so. The final manifestation of the Carters was as part of the cast of the Johnny Cash show from 1968-1971. June Carter, as most readers will know, had married Johnny Cash in 1968.

It was interesting to read how A.P. Carter, after finding that there was money to be had for songs, set about scouring the hamlets and farms of Appalachia in the 1930s to find new material to record. A.P. and the other Carters wrote plenty of songs on their own, but they didn’t have the concept of “originality” about their music that people have today. A good song was a like a good chest of drawers—it was much more important that it answer to its intended purpose than that it be the unique and indubitable work of a particular artist.

There is something really cool about reading a book about a group of performers and then being able to go onto YouTube and watch them perform. June, who I had only ever known as a slightly daffy and rather devout senior citizen, began her career as a kind of Grand Old Opry commedienne—here she is at the top of her form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLFfHRTA9mc&feature=related

I dig that crazy dancing.

June was considered the least talented of the sisters, at least musically. Anita was considered a fine singer—an opinion I share, based on these samples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4e700oABl4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flRnZT438Mk

The Carters in the 1950s knew and were very involved in the careers of Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, and of course Johnny Cash. They were nationally famous. And yet they remained very unspoiled, still working hard to make a living, still driving themselves to gigs all over the country, and still very much a family dealing with all the strife and stress of relationships, money, fixing dinner. When they weren’t working they would return to houses and communities in southwest Virginia where indoor plumbing was considered a luxury.

The music that the original Carters made sounds a bit odd to my ears—the performances seem stiff and the women sing quite a bit lower than is fashionable today. But after a couple of listens it begins to work on me. I begin to recognize how much Carter music I’ve been listening to second-hand for all these years—Bob Dylan’s great rendition of “The Girl from the Greenbriar Shore,” for example.

The connecting thread from the original trio’s first performances in 1927 through to the Johnny Cash days is Maybelle Carter—generally referred to as Mother Maybelle Carter. I’ve always found this moniker a bit offputting. It suggests a parochialism and a kind of emotional claustrophobia—“mother” is a term that I think should be used sparingly in professional situations. But, having read this book, Maybelle Carter is now OK with me. A consummate professional musician who just happened to be in business with her in-laws and then with her children, in the 1960s Maybelle took a job in a hospital sitting up with patients through the night. Why? To supplement her income. It would never have occurred to her that such work was beneath her. There’s a wonderful bit in the book where Johnny Cash recalls convincing Maybelle that she should give up this second career:

Johnny finally sat down one day to have a talk about her life. “Maybelle, you’re not going to work at the hospital anymore.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I want you to go on the road with me.”

“I’ll go,” she said, “but you know I don’t mind working in the hospital.”

Cash was silent for a moment and stared hard at her; he always did that when he wanted people to listen. Maybelle’s concern for her patients was unquestionable, but Cash felt she had a greater responsibility. “Mother, don’t you think your music’s more important?”

“Of course I do.”

Years later, Johnny would proudly recall that day. “She never worked at the hospital again.”

In her final decade Maybelle was lionized, cheered vigorously at folk festivals around the country by dope-smoking hoardes. Singing “Wildwood Flower” and playing her distinctive guitar style--the Carter scratch, it was called. I wonder what she thought of The Beverly Hillbillies.

#2: Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

I read this on the Kindle I received as a Christmas present. Took it with me on a business trip to Denmark.

Freedom was fun to read. It’s about characters who come from backgrounds a lot like mine, and it’s set in the present. It was easy to appreciate the socio-economic anxieties of the main characters, and to catch all the cultural references—to Wilco, to Garrison Keillor, to everything that pertains to being a well-read, over-educated, slightly affluent liberal American in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. When a minor working-class character in the book sneers about tofu-eating Volvo-driving liberals I think “What’s wrong with that?” I’ve owned a Volvo and I like tofu. But I’ve never felt like I was marginalizing myself with these tastes. But I guess someone like Sarah Palin would find it all pretty damning. The other night I was cooking with some Vietnamese fried onion-flavored tofu. It was really tasty. Not at all like the soft wet stuff you get in supermarkets. But I digress.

Early on Freedom was very impressive. College athlete Patty Emerson comes west to Minnesota for college to escape her striving, pretentious and unwholesomely ironic family. Patty falls in with Eliza, who is a bit of a psycho—spectacularly co-dependent, dishonest, what I think is known is some circles as a “borderline” personality.

Patty and Eliza meet up with Richard, an aspiring musician, and Walter, his highly ethical best friend, and, after Eliza drops out, the remaining three form the core of the plot for the remaining few hundred pages. Patty and Walter marry and have two children. Patty has an affair with Richard. No way this book does not eventually become a movie.

The second half of the book was conspicuously less satisfying. Franzen seemed to recall his obligations as a cultural critic, and a complicated machinery of diabolical environmental cynicism was introduced. Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but so what? Walter and his beautiful young assistant create a non-profit dedicated to fighting overpopulation. He and the beautiful young assistant begin a passionate love affair. The beautiful young assistant is killed. I lost my ability to connect to the characters as everything became more heightened, more melodramatic. It’s like when a reasonably interesting crime movie devolves to car chases and gun battles for the final 40 minutes. Is any one car chase really different from any other car chase?

I think back to Franzen’s little dispute with Oprah Winfrey. She had decided to select his previous novel, The Corrections, for her book club, and he decided he would prefer not. I can understand Franzen’s reluctance to be branded a women’s novelist, a brand that is built into the Oprah endorsement. Which is not to say that Oprah exclusively picks books with flowing script and gauzy photographs on the cover. She’s chosen Faulkner as well, though I don’t suppose her endorsement would do much to alter his reputation. Still, it was a misstep on Franzen’s part, indicative of a desire to steer his book to a desired audience and to decide for himself what sorts of categories he belongs in. I feel something of that anxiety in Freedom—a sense of calculation.

#1: The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sometime in June of 1972, a few weeks after my 16th birthday, I purchased a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed in a bookstore a few blocks away from my house in Flushing, Queens, New York.

I was already a voracious reader when I picked up The Possessed, but also a rather indiscriminate one. In the months and years before June 1972 I remember reading things like the adventure novels of Alaistair MacLean and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I read a lot of science fiction—H.P. Lovecraft was a favorite. I’d also read a biography of Houdini, and waded through the unsavory murk of The Boston Strangler (which I think had a tie-in to the movie starring Tony Curtis). When I started reading The Possessed, I was about halfway through A Canticle for Liebowitz, a well-regarded dystopian science fiction novel. I never returned to Liebowitz—it’s the Wally Pipp of my bookshelf.

I still have my original copy of The Possessed, a Signet Classic ($1.25). The cover shows stiff, shadowy figures in blue and green suggestive of a Russian icon or of a stained-glass window. In those early days I felt attached as much to the books as physical objects as to the words inside—cover pictures, typeface, even the feel of the pages. This is still true to some extent—a book to me is more than just words. This is why I could never warm up to the idea of a Kindle (though I do now own one, which is another story).

I loved the cover of my Penguin Crime and Punishment, with its outline of two characters facing each other, silhouetted dark blue against a black background. What books made me feel all those years ago comes back to me immediately when I look at their covers. Which is why I have trouble whittling down my collection of mouldering paperbacks.

When I decided to re-read The Possessed for the first time in almost 40 years, I didn’t think the old paperback would hold up, so I decided to read a new translation, by the celebrated husband/wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book has a new title now—Demons. Apparently it has something to do with the fact that the sinister characters in the book are doing the possessing in addition to (or perhaps instead of?) being themselves possessed.

The first 200 pages are a bit of a slog—lots of characters, lots of names, oblique references to things that happened in Switzerland before the beginning of the current action. (An aside: I read recently about somebody who had the idea of replacing the names of characters in Russian novels with the names of current celebrities, so that instead of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky and Varvara Ivanovna Stavrogin you could have—Charlie Sheen and Miley Cyrus. It might work.)

Anyway, after about page 200, things start to pick up. Dostoyevsky novels are constructed almost exclusively from accounts of the activities of people in highly stimulated and distressed states of consciousness. There must be 10 different characters in The Possessed who experience an excruciating and overwhelming crisis of some sort of another. Two commit suicide. Events transpire to bring windfalls of anguish to characters, often to several characters simultaneously.

But the presentation is as neat and clear as the action is chaotic. The characters in The Possessed are portrayed with both sympathy and psychological insight. Imagine if half a dozen tragic heroes from Shakespeare had to share the same stage—Othello and King Lear and Macbeth all inhabiting a single provincial town and mixing their miseries and manias.

I think in 1972 I was thrilled by the sheer emotional heat of The Possessed. It was like standing in front of an open oven door. It was the first time I was really transported by a book, and I proceeded to blow through a dozen other fat Russian novels as well as every other kind of “classic” I could find. No more sci-fi, no more Alaistair MacLean.

As any introduction or synopsis can tell you, the characters in The Possessed embody various political and philosophical trends in 1870s Russia. Some are based on actual troublemakers or agents provocateur. It seems that revolutionary politics in Russia has always been plagued by cynics, opportunists, and just plain nasty people. Nihilists. I imagine that Dostoyevsky would select for this kind of revolutionary, given his religious and conservative orientation, but still I wonder why it is that that country gets Lenins and Stalins instead of Washingtons and Jeffersons.

This political dimension of The Possessed is more apparent to me now than it was 40 years ago, but it’s still largely beside the point as far as what I get from reading the book.

The episode that made the strongest impression this time is where the character Shatov, a noble but inarticulate idealist who has fallen in with a gang of violent revolutionaries, is suddenly reunited with his wife, whom he has not seen in years and with whom he had only lived once, for a couple of weeks. She is pregnant with another man’s child and goes into labor in the tiny dark cramped apartment where Shatov lives. Shatov is overwhelmed with gratitude and tenderness for this long-lost wife, and she in turn is overcome with joy at the evidence of his devotion. Shatov goes out to summon the town midwife, who as it happens is married to one of the conspirators who have resolved the next night to murder Shatov. I wonder if on first reading I thought there was any hope for Shatov at this point—any chance that he could escape the tightening noose of his fate, as he goes through his day with his newly kindled hope? This time, though I had no recollection of this specific episode, I knew there was no hope. That’s not how things work in Dostoyevsky novels. Dostoyevsky describes the ensuing 24 hours meticulously—the calm efficiency of the midwife, the careful preparations of the conspirators, Shatov’s solicitude. The night comes and Shatov is duly murdered. Afterwards his wife and child die as well—from disease, exposure, hunger.

So anyway, I have to admit that I wasn’t able to rekindle the excitement I felt when I first read this book. I can understand why it excited me, but I don’t feel that excitement all over again. It was a good read and a profound and moving story, but this time, it didn’t change my life. No drug like a new drug.