 Literary Licence?byLev RaphaelI’m just back from doing a reading from my novel Rosedale in Love in Florence at an international Edith Wharton conference, and I took my iPad with me for the trip. I sampled many books during my week in Italy, finishing only one on the plane flight home. This kind of vacation reading felt very different from the old days when I would take one or two books at most for a long trip. They were usually trade paperbacks or occasionally a hardcover, and I’d commit myself to those specific books while I was gone. Now it’s as if I plan to be indecisive. My reliance on e-books for travel makes it strange to return home to the enveloping world of physical books. There are crammed book shelves on five walls of my study, and they date from many periods in my life: childhood, college, graduate school, my teaching years, my reviewing years. They make me think of my favorite quotations about the book lover’s life—what critic Anatole Broyard wrote in his memoir Kafka was all the Rage: “Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories.” The college year books are especially numerous and wide-ranging because I was discovering and relishing one writer after another while I was deepening my commitment to become an author myself. They include books like Fielding’s hilarious Tom Jones, books I read again as soon as I finished them, hungry to re-experience the thrill of discovery. Of course, the second time, the thrills were different but just as satisfying. I fell in love with one author after another in college, drinking them in, buying every paperback available of each one, creating a whole new universe for myself: Virginia Woolf followed George Elliot who followed Fitzgerald who followed James Baldwin who followed D. H. Lawrence. Dealing with my own shame issues, I was especially drawn to characters battered by shame, whether publicly humiliated or privately stricken. There was Lily Bart being branded an adulteress in The House of Mirth, and Isabel Archer realizing in The Portrait of a Lady that her husband has married her only for her money. And of course charming narcissistic Emma in Austen’s novel, being justly rebuked by Mr. Knightly for humiliating poor Harriet at the picnic. Those words “badly done” echoed for me over and over because I read the novel many times and in different countries. As with other Austen novels, I went through various editions when previous ones wore out, but I was reluctant to get rid of any of them because of my marginalia and because each was redolent of the time and place in which I read it. James, Wharton, Austen became authors I knew more than well. I not only read their books over and over, but read about them in biographies and criticism, read their letters, none of it required by any course, all of it welcome. I wanted to absorb those authors, become them, or become their books. And that’s one reason I did an Austen mash-up. Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile imagines what Lizzie Bennet’s family might have been like if they were Anglo-Jews and coping with both subtle and obvious prejudice in Regency England where Jews had fewer rights than Christians. I’ve insinuated my story into Austen's, not as a parody, but as a tribute, to join forces with an author I admire, to rub shoulders however briefly. You could call it voyeurism, or poking around in another writer’s study, or even literary stalking, I guess. I wanted to be her collaborator, so I didn’t superimpose a system onto her book and wrench the original out of shape; I tried to work me changes into the warp and weft of her book, without leaving any traces. With Wharton, my approach was different. The House of Mirth’s Jewish character Simon Rosedale is singularly unappealing: glossy, scheming, vulgar. He’s what Wharton’s class thought of Jewish arrivistes at the time, and Wharton herself was deeply anti-Semitic, as Hermione Lee makes clear in her Wharton biography. They even troubled her on her deathbed, where she said she hated Jews, blaming them for the Crucifixion. I’ve read the novel half a dozen times and taught it, too, and my fondness for it has never changed, neither has my discomfort with Wharton’s stereotyped Jew. Rosedale in Love uses the armature of Wharton’s plot, but is set in a different world—that of wealthy secular German Jews in 1905. They shunned the kind of publicity Astors and Vanderbilts were relishing at a time when Public Relations was a burgeoning new field. The novel creates the quotidian reality of New York in ways Wharton didn’t have to. She didn’t need to explain manners or customs that her audience would have understood (like a man doffing his hat when he meets a lady), but such niceties have been lost to us over a hundred years later. Most importantly, Rosedale in Love's Rosedale isn’t one-dimensional, he’s a man with a family, dreams, sensitivities, a man deeply ashamed of his own past and conflicted about his quest for social acceptance by non-Jews. When I was flying back from Italy, musing over Wharton and Austen and how I’d unexpectedly allied myself to them in surprising ways, I thought about how unexpected a writer’s path can be. I never imagined all those years ago having any kind of relationship either author in any way other than as a reader and admirer. Which might mean that Henry James is next.... Books mentioned in this column:
Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-six years along with a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of twenty-two books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he's seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can't identify, and he's done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His latest book Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile is his second e-book original. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.
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