Bold and Witty Borrowings

...Just as suddenly, as if the narrator has at last internalized the editorial superego nourished on Forster, his novel begins to come together according to Forster's fictional insights...

...They discover, through energy, verve and fervent articulateness, essentials that differentiate them from their models...

...That, in a way, is what happens in "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud," where Katherine reincarnates...

...In this case heroism included an attack on an Army superior for anti-Semitic attitudes, though Noah was not himself a Jew...

...Daniel Stern's six stories collected in Twice Told Tales—the title is itself an echo of Nathaniel Hawthorne's—beat around no such bush...

...She is another of those non-New York non-Jewish naïfs, and Dickstein is disappointed when she looks into Freud's text...

...Exactly like a character in a Forster novel, Gideon dies suddenly "on the Wednesday after Labor Day...

...All the while Katherine is forgetting her child, she is studying Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life for her training therapy...

...with all the wonderful and awful obligations of love and light...

...She soon creates another Brooksmith by taking up the education of Zoe, a black student, formerly a prostitute, with a "sensibility above her station...

...If I have a complaint, it is that the author for the most part leaves unnamed his first-person narrators, thus cursing a reviewer with the awkwardness of repeated references to "the narrator...

...In the shadow of death, he begins to savor life: "It was likeadream...

...The elements in Stern's story produce fascinating, ever-expanding reverberations of the original...

...In "The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud," Dickstein, a widower, is married to a widow 14years his junior...

...Not even a poet and mother dying young can dampen the spirits of this sprightly comedy...

...Is this a tip-off that narrators have been more literary device than story-making flesh-and-blood to him...

...Reviewed by Norma Rosen Author of the forthcoming novel, "John and Anzia: An American Romance" Painters have developed a rich tradition that allows for homage to older masters...

...In contrast to the downward-spiraling end of James' little tragedy, Stern provides a surprising and moving opening up of possibility among all these layers of influence...

...In the original, James portrays a butler who has listened to such wonderful talk at salon gatherings that when his employer dies he is neither fit for ordinary service nor can he aspire to such cultivation again...

...At a party given by theTrillings, Katherine finds her heart's desire: "Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Mailer (early), Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rahv, Bellow (very early), Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx...

...Brooksmith," the first story Zoe has ever read, crystallizes her struggle: "I am Brooksmith," she says to Celia...

...After Rembrandt, they title their works, After Velasquez...

...Not only his book but also the war, the deaths and betrayals thus far, organize themselves into some order: events moving forward, characters rounded or flat, life for once as elegantly shaped as fiction...

...This leaves two more kindsof Brooksmith survivors: the narrator, and Michael's bereft wife, Celia...

...Apparently what we spend everywhere," says the narrator of one of the stories, "is not money, stolen or earned, not energy, not talent, not love, but ourselves...

...She comes east with an American liberalism that, as Trilling famously expressed it in his Preface to The Liberal Imagination, "limits its view of the world to what it can deal with...

...Here the narrator and a friend, Noah, are displaced, life-embittered World War II veterans...

...First, the narrator's friend, Michael Morris, a man of great charm and wide artistic acquaintance, actually a kind of Brooksmith artistrnanqué, dies...

...As with the Borges character who rewrites Don Quixote word for word only to find that it is no longer Cervantes' story, so with Daniel Stern's narrators...

...In "The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling," beautiful Katherine Eudemie, a WASP from the Midwest with writing aspirations, makes the classic, post-World War II journey to New York and embarks on her search for Jewish intellectuals...

...The child, named Tulip, is reared to precociousness by a group of Russian Rendezvous eccentrics...

...Gentile, Judaphile, turning 25, " Katherine even has to have "chutzpah" defined for her...

...For his benightedness he is punished by a vision of the day his new bride will become his widow...

...Even when illusions are dispelled, the narrator deliberately wills them back into place...

...The literary mind sees life not only as raw material for literature...

...it sees life through literature: What one reads shapes seeing...

...When word gets out it causes the kind of good-for-business media explosion that never happens in response to Katherine's writing...

...Some, the narrator concedes, were present only by their influence...

...How can we, in the face of so much clever cavorting, carp...

...Despite his by now being niched in nada, he extracts from experience the kind of insight that Hemingway, with his abhorrence of any stated affirmation, would assuredly have rejected—a pity, for it is a stunning one...

...Read Daniel Stern's Twice Told Tales to see not only how cleverly literature can comment on literature, but also, and above all, on life...

...Unable to renounce liberal optimism, Katherinediesasuicide...

...He had not wanted to marry anyone who would turn into "the smartass, overeducated, underserious women he'd spent most of his life with...

...was never addressed by Ernest Hemingway, but it obliquely enters Stern's "A Clean, WellLighted Place by Ernest Hemingway...

...Instead of having committed suicide, she's had a baby, which she keeps forgetting, in serendipitous parapraxis, in the coatroom of a restaurant called The Russian Rendezvous...

...He wants flat and round characters in the right proportion and place...

...Gideon, a wheelchair-bound editor and veteran of World War II, perhaps influenced by the success of war novels by James Jones and Norman Mailer, convinces the narrator that his book, too, should be a novel...

...Still, he clings to the illusions he built upon the dead friend, who projected a Hemingway-heroic persona (grace under pressure, remember...

...With a bold and witty hand, Stern weaves his stories in and about the imprint of their famous predecessors, allowing his themes of illusion and reality, displacement and recovery, to ricochet in countless ironies off the originals...

...Forster...

...Framed as Katherine's eulogy delivered by the narratorlover, the story ends with his ambivalent apostrophe to youth, beauty and blindness: "Till morning wakes us...

...These six stories are beautifully modulated cadences, a narrator's retrospective filled with vivid immediacy, in which the lines suggest the rhythmic rise and fall of time itself, like some breathing Gulliver on whom we Lilliputians rest...

...A simple blockbuster is what he wanted, nononsense nonfiction, a tell-all about the bigwigs that would also net a profit...

...Brooksmith by Henry James," possibly the most intricately interwoven of the stories, plays with the elements of pupil and master, class, insight, inspiration, loss and the interaction of art and art-lover...

...Another veteran, this time of "Nam," who is himself involved in shady dealings, wants to write "about who made money out of the war and how they did it...

...After Katherine dies again, this time with finality, her husband remarries, her grown-up child becomes pregnant, business prospers, and the dead young wife, as in fairy tales, can be consulted at her grave for advice: The psychopathology of everyday life shapes the world...

...The narrator's torment begins...

...Ironic cross-commentary runs thick...

...Leibnitz' philosophical question, "Why is there not nothing...

...It is the most natural thing in the world that Noah should want to make a movie of Hemingway's story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and also that he should die before that can be accomplished...

...Once his buddy is gone, the narrator catches the Hemingway syndrome with avengeance: insomnia, late-night drinking in bars, a vulnerability to nada...

...Writers, working from more limited languagepalettes, generally hope to hide influence...

...He hands over for study a copy of an invaluable little work that is the title of the story, "Aspects of the Novel by E.M...

...What is exhaled is peerless memory, the greatest twice-told tale of all...

...Instead, Gideon wants art...