– The English understand wool.
My mother sat on a small sofa in our suite at Claridge’s, from which the television had been removed at her request. She held in her lap a bolt of very beautiful handloomed tweed which she had brought back from the Outer Hebrides. She had in fact required only a few metres for a new suit.
I use the word “suit” because I am writing in English, but the French tailleur – she would naturally think of clothes in French – makes intelligible that one would travel from Marrakech to the Outer Hebrides to examine the work of a number of weavers, perhaps to establish a relationship with a weaver of real gifts. It makes intelligible that one would bring one’s daughter, so that she might develop an eye for excellence in the fabric, know the marks of workmanship of real quality, observe how one develops an understanding with a craftsman of talent. The word “suit,” I think, makes this look quite mad.
My admiration for Helen DeWitt only continues to grow. Look what she’s managed to do in just sixty-two pages: It’s a captivating story, written in a way that maximizes surprise; and without sacrificing drama or humor, delivers on the themes central to DeWitt’s work: uncompromising aesthetics/ethics, nontraditional education, and the treachery of (much of) the publishing world.
I’m tempted to go through the book, writing about what caught me on each page, each subtle phrasing, each twist – but, alas, to discuss the details would be mauvais ton, spoiling the delight the reader feels in encountering surprise, revelation, depth, nuance, on their own. And so I’m going to take a different approach: with a brief overview, I’ll stick to the themes and motifs I’ve mentioned above. To see how they are executed, and how they impact one’s reading, you’ll just have to read the book.
Surprise: Let’s start with the physical book itself. The text is short-story length, and has been published as part of the Storybook ND series from New Directions Publishing. Featuring eight selections at present, the collection “aims to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” In his review for The Millions, Ryan Lackey mentions “[t]hey remind me of the Little Golden Books;” yes, exactly! That was my first thought when I finally had the book in my hands (it was sold out for months after Ann Patchett talked about it in her Tiktok series): it looks like a kid’s book from the 60s: hard, glossy cover, small size, a total of 72 pages, 62 of which is story text.
But don’t worry; there’s enough in those 62 pages to keep a reader occupied. Obsessed, even.
In briefest terms, it’s the story of a young girl who, having been raised in a rather extraordinary way up to the age of seventeen, encounters a life-changing surprise. It’s about how she handles that change, and how she handles the pressures others, wishing to capitalize for themselves on it, place upon her.
“I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton.”
Ah, so you see, I did not suddenly acquire a French fetish when I used the term above; I had my reasons. Mauvais ton appears repeatedly throughout the book. The French phrase, the reverse of bon ton, is typically translated as “bad taste.” However, the publisher site indicates that the phrases “loses something in the translation” and some sources imply a breach of etiquette or protocol, or vulgarity.
What this opens up for me – particularly in how the story plays out – is that there is this melding of aesthetics and morality. Now, I may be sensitized to this having just encountered it in connection with Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, but consider how Maman uses the term mauvais ton: she takes her annual six-week tour of Europe during Ramadan since “it would be mauvais ton to be waited on by persons who were fasting”; she pays her household staff for that period, including a two week posts-Eid recovery period, because “it would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.” She has an electronic keyboard installed in her London hotel room – replacing the removed television – because “it would be mauvais ton to inflict one’s music on persons who have expressed no desire to hear it….” This view of taste goes well beyond proper tailoring; it might be considered courtesy, taking others into consideration; that is, morality by other means.
It so happens this is a motif in DeWitt’s The Last Samurai as well. Sybella’s aesthetics are her morality, and are the tenets by which she raises her son Ludo so he will be able to recognize – and despise – artifice and shallowness when he meets his father. The question is whether this goes too far. In Maman’s case, her view seem to be a bit milder, though she’s clearly conveyed a similar worldview to Marguerite.
That too is a similarity; both novels focus on the education of children. In Samurai, the child Ludo was the instigator, taking an interest in reading Greek when he was four; his mother merely cooperated, and it grew from there. In Wool, Maman seems (since we never hear from her directly, and can only surmise based on Marguerite’s description of her actions) to be preparing the girl for a particular way of living, one fitting someone with more money than is good for anyone. Marguerite learns bridge, tennis, horsemanship, piano, and apparently learns them all quite well. Whether she learns algebra, history, or literature is uncertain, though it becomes very clear that she is a fine practical logician, an astute judge of character and behavior, and she knows how to read. I don’t say that last part lightly: I mean, she really knows how to read. And what. And when.
She also learns something we might think of as privacy. Encouraged, after the surprise in the book, to be more forthcoming about her feelings, particularly the juicy dark negative feelings she might naturally be having, she conducts a little experiment. She visits a high-end members-only club and displays her talents at bridge; on being invited to a party given by another member, she livens things up by playing the piano, and receives more invitations.
I did not think they would have given me invitations if I had been talking about my feelings instead of dressing with éclat and playing bridge with flair and playing the piano when a party was off to a dull start. So perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think they were people I would want to know.
As someone who is more prone to leaking feelings all over, I couldn’t follow this lead, but it does seem to work for her. I can hear DeWitt’s voice in there, responding when editors kept insisting, she make changes, major and minor, to Samurai. Had she listened, I would not be writing this now, because they would have turned it from a master work into a run-of-the-mill novel, probably about feelings.
And that brings us to my final point. DeWitt has had some of the worst publishing luck in history. Beyond editors who wanted to dumb her down, there were publishers who couldn’t handle the work, either. And the piece de resistance, a publisher who went out of business in a way that trapped Samurai in out-of-print purgatory for over a decade while reader demand grew, then slipped away.
This book is, perhaps, more than anything, a slap in the face of publishing. That may seem strange, given that a book must be published, but New Directions is the publisher that rescued her. If this is all new information, you might want to take a look at Lee Konstantinou’s wonderful book The Last Samurai Reread, which takes a close look at how Samurai reflects what she went through to get it published.
And so we come to the core plot of the book, a struggle between a writer and a publisher who isn’t above dangling threats of financial disaster to get the book she wants.
The French understand wine, cheese, bread.
The Belgians understand chocolate.
The Italians understand coffee and ice cream.
The Germans understand precision, machines. (She in fact kept a Porsche in Paris.)
The Swiss understand discretion.
The Arabs understand honor, which embraces generosity and hospitality.
When I speak of these forms of understanding I do not mean that they are instantiated in every individual of a nation, a culture…. It is as if certain qualities flourish in certain social conjunctions. Who can say why an English tailor knows what to do with Scottish tweed? If you explain yourself to him he will be able to understand.
So if you do business with an Arab, oh, of course, you can haggle over a brace of partridges in the street. But if it’s a matter of importance, you might spend many hours drinking mint tea talking of other things. You wait until each has decided whether he is dealing with someone he can trust. If there is no trust, there is no point in signing a piece of paper. This they understand.
If you deal with people who don’t understand that, be very careful about what it says on a piece of paper.
How that plays out may not be totally realistic – the whole book skates at the boundaries of realism – and might easily be challengeable in a court of law, but is nonetheless a joy to read. If they ever make a movie of this, there will be cheering for a seventeen-year-old who refuses to descend into maivais ton, even for a couple of million dollars.
DeWitt’s characters aren’t always likeable, or even understandable. We may not agree with them; we may think they’re downright wrong. But they make their way in the world nonetheless, and there’s always something to admire in them, if only their stubbornness. She has admitted, in a Vulture interview about Samurai, that she doesn’t understand this insistence readers – and editors – have about loving a character or a book:
But in some ways DeWitt has the bullshit of the publishing world nailed. “I don’t know,” she said, “how to deal with a world where there’s this language of infatuation that people use. ‘Well, I didn’t fall in love with the book.’ Or: ‘I fell in love with the book!’ ‘Infatuated!’ ‘Besotted!’ ‘Obsessed!’ I’m not sure that that has ever been my attitude toward any text. Throwing around this language is really a way of denying the mechanics of attachment. You hear this all the time: If they don’t fall in love with it the first time, that’s it. Well, that’s a psychological issue. Look, I sometimes think I have Asperger’s syndrome. I’m really bad at people’s emotional investment in things.” She compared editors who don’t respond to rational arguments about a book to Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Gorgias — sophists who sulk whenever Socrates frustrates their conventional arguments.
“Publishing Can Break Your Heart”, an interview with Christian Lorentzen, available online at Vulture
With apologies to DeWitt, I love this book; that is, I have a strong emotional attachment, but that’s because it does such a good job of limning the themes she’s already expanded on in Samurai, in a very different setting.
And it does something else as well. Wool encourages us all to get some sense of what it is to understand things – wool, cheese, legal deals – and to gain some understanding of our own. In the same way Ludo, in Samurai, came to understand what was and was not of value in a father, and how he could best help his mother, at the same time, Marguerite comes to know who she is, and what she has that is of value to her, if not to a publisher wanting yet another bleeding-heart tell-all. Marguerite – who, by the way, had another name, a name not revealed to us, a fascinating detail I hadn’t realized until I read Heather Cass White’s review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (UK) – knows the value of her education, and doesn’t judge her experience as a tragedy but a blessing. She could cry like a rainstorm and howl at the wind over what she’s lost, or she can look at what she was given, and carry on. Whether she’s made the right choice is not for us to decide.
And that’s another interesting twist to this tiny little book: it’s as if there are a couple of other novels hovering in the ether around it, the before and the after. DeWitt could have made this another doorstop of a novel, including those elements. She chose not to. She didn’t want to explore feelings; she wanted to deliver a surgical strike at the heart of her relationship with the publishing industry, and she did a superb job of it. We can enter into the fictional world and create our own novels, if we wish. Or we can just enjoy what we’re given, and carry on.
A Just Recompense 