Any Man Having Great Fun

By Terry Gratuity

More on Leonard Michaels from the Paris Review.

5) "I hate to use adverbs because of the ‘ly’ endings. They seem like sloppy trailers." The degree to which contemporary writers passionately hate adverbs fascinates me: The way they violently eschew them, the fury with which editors and teachers frantically pluck them out of prose. The whole thing is worthy of more notice. Why do the "LY" words strike the contemporary mind as not just dreadful, but as horribly, gruesomely, and brutally bad?

6) "Life is never apprehended with such fullness and such consistence of feeling over as long a period of time as you typically find in novels. Maybe that's because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don't generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren't so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel, this sort of accumulation, or experience of accumulation, that is not available in life itself." Writers duly note that our lives don't seem to have plots. Our lives lack clear-cut morals and meanings – more than just writers have noted this. But Michaels takes it a step forward into further oblivion. The bucket has a hole in it. We pour our experience in and it just streams out. There's no weight. We take in experience and piss it out. We live in the eternal present and the novel deludes us into thinking that we're building on a past, a burgeoning past.

7) Michaels makes arguments for Kafka's diaries, Montaigne's essays, Le Rochefoucauld's maxims, and George Herbert's poetry. Then we get this sentence: "On the other hand, Sentimental Education, a long novel, is one of the best books I've ever read." Flaubert's last complete novel is a key text in the literature of an eternal present. It is the great novel of lazy entropy. It is the 19th century masterpiece where little adds up. The narrator finds himself at the end of it more than halfway through a life, compromised, bewildered, and haunted.

8) "The publisher should have attached a warning to the cover: This book is not to be read by morons or lunatics. But they'd never do anything that might kill sales." This is Michaels bitching about the reception his The Men's Club received. Paris Review has pulled the quote in beige and blue for the little bookmark they include with the issue. [Magazines that come with their own bookmarks is a subject for another day.] On the reverse of the bookmark is an advertisement for something called The Raleigh: On The Ocean. Evidently a hotel. The irony cuts.

9) "I was uninterested in Kennedy and his circle. When Bob Dylan was big, I preferred the Coasters. I've never gotten with it. I lack a sensibility that quivers at change in the cultural atmosphere."

10) On Hollywood: "I should say, however, that I had more fun hanging around New York, Berkeley, and L.A. with Howard Gottfried, the producer, than I've ever had with anyone, except my other producer friend, Tom Luddy. I know plenty of people who live the good life, but very few outside the movie business know how to make life into a continuous, high-quality entertainment, despite serious worries and very hard work. In my experience, any man having great fun is probably about to get divorced."

In my experience, any man having great fun is probably about to get divorced.

I prize wit over wisdom, but then, I'm not married.

Michael Dweck, Mermaid, 2007