Handler, Daniel. And then? And then? What else? Liveright, New York, 1924. Memoir; 5/25.

I was hard-pressed to categorize this. It’s a memoir but also a kind of rambling apologia for Handler’s life and writing. It wasn’t available on Kindle and eventually I was able to order and receive the hardcover book. Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket when he writes children’s books) has interesting ideas and I think is a creative and sincere author. I liked this book partly because as I read it (and sought the real character of the author as Stephen Pinker tells us we ought to be doing) Handler is candid and humble about his strange health history, sexuality, and his writing career.

We are told he developed, following unusual dreams, hallucinations and seizures (which apparently persist) and the best efforts of qualified US medical experts haven’t come up with a diagnosis.

Handler was strangely and it appears not harmfully sexually abused by a man when he was an older child. His story contains all sorts of descriptions of heterosexual experience which emphasize the unusual nature of discovery and the uniqueness of relationships. Early struggles to get published as an author led to employment in a bookstore where an older man approached him and in Handler’s signature fashion – he was interested in the experience and didn’t have conventional worries about it – he consented to a homosexual relationship lasting several months.

It’s in a similar randomness of spirit that he came up with his quirky nom de plume for writing children’s fiction:

During (a phone call to a conservative organization he intended to mock), the conservative woman on the phone asked me for my name and for some reason I panicked. Don’t give your name to these people, I thought, and so I instead sputtered the first thing that came into my head: Lemony Snicket.

The Wikipedia article on this author mentions “controversy”, involving his having said what he thinks which has prompted criticism, from the extreme left for example. In his chapter “Books are Like People” he delves into the relationship between authors and their work. He calls the idea that “we should separate the art from the artist” foolish and impossible, and goes on:

… the peculiarities of individual works come from the peculiarities of the individuals who make them. All of these peculiarities – all of them – are problematic to somebody or other…. Fuck separating the art from the artist and fuck forgiving any author for anything.”

I liked his closing comment in that chapter after saying that while you may love a book and it may thrill you or make you sick “right in a row or even simultaneously” that books are like people in that way. And if a book is problematic you can easily solve your problem with it: “Leave the book behind, put your clothes back on, and go home.” This is a more open-minded approach than the famous attitude of DH Lawrence deflecting criticism about himself and his life: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

Along similar lines for Handler a recurring theme is flight from drawing conclusions. He celebrates “gaps” in people’s inevitable search for answers “not only in literature it seems to me – and here is where I generally lose the (publishing) executives – but in life.”

Surely it is more fun, more essential, to stumble amidst the blanks we find in the world, understanding little but delighting in the resulting blur, free of all those tangible burdens which drive us, at least sometimes, to drink.

…and: 

Surrounded by so much nonsense, it can be tricky to find the explicit path you want, amidst all of the details you’re missing, all the stories in which you don’t get to participate. Everything is around you, but you can’t take it all in and you certainly can’t convey all of it to anyone who might be patient enough to listen to you. What do you censor, what do you keep? … You can’t say everything. But take a look around.

His advocacy for avoiding conclusion and a seeming “whatever” approach might sound a bit woke, but he leans in emphasizing unanswered questions more toward responsibility and individuality, not toward overwhelming relativism.

I imagine this book would delight anyone who agrees with the author, and probably prompt rolled eyes and shrugged shoulders among people who don’t. I of course am ambivalent…

??/9.0