What do you think?
Rate this book
The Position of the Body
Book by Stern, Richard G.
195 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1986
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 8, 2015
Earlier this month (October 2015), I read Golk, Stern’s first novel, published in 1960. I’d never heard of Stern before this, and I’d been drawn to the book because it was an old Penguin with a cover illustration done by Ralph Steadman—characteristically brash and spiky—and an appreciative blurb by Saul Bellow. Stern’s recent obituary (2013) cited him as a writer’s writer, little known by the general reading public, but much appreciated by peers. Golk is an odd little novel, a sort of comedic Great Gatsby whose milieu is the public world of television, where characters are too clever by half, with dialog that crackles and insinuates. Curious to get a better sense of Stern (and Golk), I sought out a couple more of his books, choosing The Position of the Body and Other Men’s Daughters.
Aptly, I picked up Postion of the Body first. This “orderly miscellany” is excerpted from a sentence from Samuel Beckett, from his story “The Unnamable”: “It is well to establish the position of the body from the outset, before passing on to more important matters.” These occasional pieces—reviews and lectures and address—are the means by which Stern gets (and presents) his bearings before he (and we) get to his serious writing, the stuff of his novels.
Stern spent most of his life teaching the craft of fiction at the University of Chicago, from the late 1950’s to the 90’s, and in that time he cultivated a wealth of literary contacts. He shows himself to be urbane and cosmopolitan, gracious and inquisitive, sober and insightful, able in all of his travels to arrange formal or informal occasions to speak to other writers, many of whom are friends or who will become friends. This humane erudition is evident throughout the many pieces that compose this collection, and one of the highlights is getting a glimpse through high-class gossip of writers like Roth and Bellow.
Most of the pieces were written in the early 80’s, and there is more than a whiff of disdain and disapproval of the Reagan politics of the time, though there is evident concern when on his way back to the States after a speaking tour throughout Africa he and his international cohort learn of, discuss, and dissect the news about Hinckley’s attempted assassination. Stern employs this particular anecdote in his initial essay—“Hunos and Historians, Epigones and Dreamers”—to illustrate, as well, his thesis about the relation of history to fiction, a process of moving from communal fact, to social context, and then personalized empathy and emotion.
Stern asserts himself in the course of a variety of reviews and overviews of and tributes to particular books, genres, and individuals, but it is in the final section of the book that he becomes most direct and least concerned about the “I” he presents to the reader. (“The ‘I’ that shows up in these pieces was, I think, set down without too much worry about how he’d sound. I see now that I didn’t worry enough.”) “The Glass Goddess” is obliquely confessional, and it alienates in a way that Stern probably does not intend. While trapping the piece in a discussion of the distance between tv and viewer, between the televised personality that pretends intimacy and the viewer who responds earnestly, naively in kind, the crux of the piece is his own infatuation with tv newswoman Deborah Norville, whom he takes to lunch one day and finds there is but a poor and only polite connection.
In “The Debris of the Novel”, he talks about the five-year writing of a novel (A Father’s Words) and the 5,000 pages of notes and drafts that he has accumulated. (It turns out that the novel is to be edited further, which will mean even more detritus…) When considering using a word processor in the future, rather than the dictation method he used to produce A Father’s Words, he reflects that the many years and many pages were not the result of method but more his punishment for not have had a clear vision of what he intended to write. Stern admits to a degree of hubris and naivete in the essay that follows, “Underway”, in which he professes a clear vision of what he intends to write about in his next novel, which characters and themes he has labored over six months to pull together through research, interviews, rumination, etc. [The irony—learned in subsequent reading to find out more about this project—is that the big novel he planned to write about the movers and shakers in the world of politics never appeared, and the next novel to appear—15 years later—was about a pair of Hollywood has beens. This fact itself is very telling and very human: a failed promise indicating there were difficulties, or circumstances, or inabilities, or even lack of will that prevented him from writing what he’d set out to write.]
The Position of the Body well served its purpose—thoughtfully, charmingly—giving me the perspective I need to pass “on to more important matters”: reading more of Stern’s fiction, re-considering Golk, and dipping again into one of his several volumes of orderly miscellany.
Aptly, I picked up Postion of the Body first. This “orderly miscellany” is excerpted from a sentence from Samuel Beckett, from his story “The Unnamable”: “It is well to establish the position of the body from the outset, before passing on to more important matters.” These occasional pieces—reviews and lectures and address—are the means by which Stern gets (and presents) his bearings before he (and we) get to his serious writing, the stuff of his novels.
Stern spent most of his life teaching the craft of fiction at the University of Chicago, from the late 1950’s to the 90’s, and in that time he cultivated a wealth of literary contacts. He shows himself to be urbane and cosmopolitan, gracious and inquisitive, sober and insightful, able in all of his travels to arrange formal or informal occasions to speak to other writers, many of whom are friends or who will become friends. This humane erudition is evident throughout the many pieces that compose this collection, and one of the highlights is getting a glimpse through high-class gossip of writers like Roth and Bellow.
Most of the pieces were written in the early 80’s, and there is more than a whiff of disdain and disapproval of the Reagan politics of the time, though there is evident concern when on his way back to the States after a speaking tour throughout Africa he and his international cohort learn of, discuss, and dissect the news about Hinckley’s attempted assassination. Stern employs this particular anecdote in his initial essay—“Hunos and Historians, Epigones and Dreamers”—to illustrate, as well, his thesis about the relation of history to fiction, a process of moving from communal fact, to social context, and then personalized empathy and emotion.
Stern asserts himself in the course of a variety of reviews and overviews of and tributes to particular books, genres, and individuals, but it is in the final section of the book that he becomes most direct and least concerned about the “I” he presents to the reader. (“The ‘I’ that shows up in these pieces was, I think, set down without too much worry about how he’d sound. I see now that I didn’t worry enough.”) “The Glass Goddess” is obliquely confessional, and it alienates in a way that Stern probably does not intend. While trapping the piece in a discussion of the distance between tv and viewer, between the televised personality that pretends intimacy and the viewer who responds earnestly, naively in kind, the crux of the piece is his own infatuation with tv newswoman Deborah Norville, whom he takes to lunch one day and finds there is but a poor and only polite connection.
In “The Debris of the Novel”, he talks about the five-year writing of a novel (A Father’s Words) and the 5,000 pages of notes and drafts that he has accumulated. (It turns out that the novel is to be edited further, which will mean even more detritus…) When considering using a word processor in the future, rather than the dictation method he used to produce A Father’s Words, he reflects that the many years and many pages were not the result of method but more his punishment for not have had a clear vision of what he intended to write. Stern admits to a degree of hubris and naivete in the essay that follows, “Underway”, in which he professes a clear vision of what he intends to write about in his next novel, which characters and themes he has labored over six months to pull together through research, interviews, rumination, etc. [The irony—learned in subsequent reading to find out more about this project—is that the big novel he planned to write about the movers and shakers in the world of politics never appeared, and the next novel to appear—15 years later—was about a pair of Hollywood has beens. This fact itself is very telling and very human: a failed promise indicating there were difficulties, or circumstances, or inabilities, or even lack of will that prevented him from writing what he’d set out to write.]
The Position of the Body well served its purpose—thoughtfully, charmingly—giving me the perspective I need to pass “on to more important matters”: reading more of Stern’s fiction, re-considering Golk, and dipping again into one of his several volumes of orderly miscellany.
Displaying 1 of 1 review