I had a class there.

Over at Goodreports I’ve added a double review of a couple of books that look at some of the problems currently facing higher education: Stefan Collini’s Speaking of Universities and Robert Boyers’s The Tyranny of Virtue.

This is a subject that interests me. I’ve never been an academic but I know quite a few and when we meet up I often get an earful about what’s happening on campus. It’s not a happy story, especially when it comes to the Humanities. In my review I make the comparison to the dying congregations of mainstream Christian churches. I have friends who are ministers and I’ve always found it interesting how so many of their concerns intersect with what’s happening in higher ed.

Unfortunately, decline brings out the worst in people. Hence all of the bizarre and very nasty moral posturing that has become so prominent on campuses, and the compromises made by the old guard in order to hold on to the perks of privilege. I call this the twitch of the death nerve. Again I feel like my minister friends when they look at the more popular churches today that are filled with (and fueled by) righteousness and anger while deriding “lukewarm Christianity.” As they put it, that’s not the kind of church they used to know, just as today’s university is not the one I attended thirty years ago.

I’m sad to see what’s happening. I wish things were different. But I feel the same way about the Humanities today as I do about the CBC: a good idea that somehow lost its way, to the point where now it scarcely seems worth bothering with let alone supporting. It’s all so disappointing.

In my notes on the previous Maigret novel, Maigret’s Mistake, I started off by mentioning the fact that there are recurring characters in the series. One of these is the innocent man on the run. Such a fugitive even shows up in Maigret’s Mistake, in the form of the deceased’s boyfriend.

In almost every case these guys are just red herrings. In Maigret Goes to School the story is kicked off by another, the village schoolmaster Joseph Gastin, who everyone in the village of Saint-André seems eager to convict for the murder of the village scold. We can be pretty sure he’s innocent though, and he’s soon packed off the district jail while Maigret goes looking for the real killer.

Not a very interesting entry. The mechanics of how the old lady got shot, and who saw it happen, depend on being able to visualize a complicated physical setting. I don’t know if a map or drawing would have helped. Once again the people of the village close ranks and it’s up to Maigret to somehow pierce their defensive shell. Once again he feels personally challenged, this time by the deputy mayor.

There he was, planted in the middle of the village like a malicious god who knew everything that happened inside people’s heads and homes, enjoying the show put on for him in solitary pleasure.

He saw Maigret more as an equal than as an enemy.

“You’re a very shrewd man,” he seemed to say. “You pass for a champion at your game. In Paris, you find out everything anyone tries to hide from you.

“Only I’m a shrewd man, too. And here, I’m the one who knows.

“Try! Play your game. Question people. Worm their secrets out of them.

“We’ll see if you ever figure anything out!”

But in the end it’s not as hard as all that.

Maigret index

In Revolutions I made a reference to something I like to think of as the Rule of Ten, which I’d first put forward in an earlier essay. Here’s what I said:

Several years ago, in an essay I wrote for Canadian Notes & Queries, I made the point that literary talent typically burns brightly for a decade: “Most writers – not all, but most – are, as Faulkner once put it, ‘hot’ for only a little while. Faulkner himself went through this phase in the 1930s. Hemingway in the 1920s. It usually lasts about ten years.” This was, it seemed to me, such an obvious observation it scarcely needed elaboration. If any were needed, Robert McCrum supplied it when he echoed my thoughts in the pages of the Guardian:

“The truth about most so-called literary careers is that they last 10 years, if you’re lucky. Look at Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad. They all had “careers,” but when you look more closely at the trajectory of literary success, you find that its parabola describes, at best, a decade of creativity. Austen had completed the drafts of her greatest books by the age of 30. Dickens’s supreme decade was 1850 (David Copperfield) to 1860-61 (Great Expectations). With Conrad, Heart of Darkness came out in 1899. An astonishing decade (Nostromo; Secret Agent etc.) followed. But after 1909, there’s really only Under Western Eyes, and nothing else of equal stature. Shakespeare clinches this argument. Hamlet was probably written in 1600, after an extraordinary year in which . . . he also wrote As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Henry V. Thereafter, all the great tragedies appeared in an astoundingly short span. By the end of that decade he was done. The Tempest was given at court in November 1611.”

Are there exceptions to the Rule of Ten? Of course. Alice Munro may be one, though even here, I would argue, there has been some significant dropping off. But the exceptions prove the general rule, and it’s one that holds much the same everywhere in the English-speaking world. One only has to glance across the pond to see a stable of at-one-time major authors – Rushdie, McEwan, Amis – who, since the millennium (at the latest), have done very, very little to burnish their credentials for entry into the literary pantheon. In the U.S., the record has been just as grim. Every publishing season duly brings forth the latest offerings of that nation’s aging literary lions. But who, aside from someone needing to fill a book column, could even begin to get excited by anything written by Philip Roth after The Human Stain? Anything written by Thomas Pynchon after . . . The Crying of Lot 49? . . . no, let’s be nice and say Mason & Dixon. Anything written by Don DeLillo after Underworld, or (and here I know I’m treading on holy ground, but someone needs to say it), anything written by Cormac McCarthy after Blood Meridian? Yes, the big awards continued to pile up. And yes, newspapers continued to run fawning interviews with these titans, reviews gushing over any fresh evidence of their genius. But this was only to prolong a farce that, in all of these cases, had gone on more than long enough. As though, faced with the spectacle of aging, punch-drunk, and pot-bellied boxers coming out of retirement only to stagger on unsteady legs while being clobbered around the ring and into dementia, we should have turned and looked away, saddened and a bit sick at the pathetic spectacle.

This past week I had occasion to think again about the Rule of Ten as two examples came up. In Claire Tomalin’s new biography The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World she focuses on the young Wells both because the formation of a great writer is always more interesting than their decline, and because all of Wells’ major work was done by 1910.

Given that his first novel, The Time Machine, had come out in 1895 this gave him an effective career of fifteen years. Close enough, and I think if you took out Tono-Bungay (1909) you’d have a good argument for making the cut-off date 1905, thus satisfying the Rule of Ten pretty neatly.

The second item was a Robert Gottlieb piece in the New York Times on Sinclair Lewis, “The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was.” In Lewis’s case the Rule was strictly in operation, with his vital years running from Main Street (1920) to Dodsworth (1929). Like Wells, Lewis would go on being a celebrity author and keep publishing for decades, but nothing much would come of it. Lewis in particular was a wreck at the end, the sort of sad spectacle I mentioned as being the general rule.

I think everyone is aware of the Rule of Ten, including authors themselves, though it’s not something they like to talk about. It’s interesting that one workaround that has been effected in our own time is for bestselling authors to effectively become brands. This allows for the same names to dominate the bestseller lists not just year after year but decade after decade. Testimony, I think, to the power of the brand in our economy, since in most if not every case the authors in question are far removed from their best work, and in some instances aren’t even the authors of the books being published under their name.

But sales are one thing and critical reception another. As I said five years ago: “Yes, the big awards continued to pile up. And yes, newspapers continued to run fawning interviews with these titans, reviews gushing over any fresh evidence of their genius.” Why? Doesn’t everything we know about how these things play out suggest we should ignore writers at this point, just as Tomalin wisely skips the later Wells? Wouldn’t it make more sense to move on?

While the Maigret novels have lots of recurring themes and character types, Simenon kept them fresh with a good mix of complex psychological case studies. A good example is the monstrous Dr. Gouin in Maigret’s Mistake. In general terms he’s another of Simenon’s spoiled man-babies, waited upon by codependent women. But in being a world-famous surgeon he magnifies this, becoming a kind of cult leader to a harem whose members compete with one another to serve and protect him. He’s also sexually insatiable in a passionless way, which is the very quality that gets him into trouble.

The contest between Maigret and Gouin is a similarly bloodless affair. Like Maigret, Gouin is a God-the-Father figure, but his arrogance sets him apart. Maigret sees himself, at least in this book, as more like the Son, descending to the human level so that he can empathize with the people he’s investigating. Gouin wants to remain above humanity and is only interested in using others, in particular homing in on people who want to be used.

Not a particularly gripping entry in the series, and I thought it jumped the rails a bit in the final pages. I don’t believe in Madame Gouin turning against her husband like that. But then jealousy might have won out over her martyr complex.

Maigret’s mistake? I think it was drinking a glass of marc in the early going. Marc is pomace brandy, or so I’m told, and once Maigret starts a case drinking one particular type of alcohol – calvados, beer, red wine, or whisky – he feels he has to keep drinking the same until the case is wrapped up. A curious but endearing superstition. But he doesn’t even like marc! Poor Maigret.

Maigret index