A Formalist Critique of the Novels by Charles Reznikoff

A Formalist Critique of The Novels

Charles Reznikoff's novels are presently out of print. Forgotten amidst the wealth of poetry (although that too is slowly vanishing, or at least relegated to a cult status) and undervalued (in terms of readership and critical examination), the novels represent something of an oddity: While presenting dramatic unity, Reznikoff remains consistent with his Objectivist stylistic approach and technique. Both Family Chronicle and The Manner Music resist melodramatic impulses, contrived character conflicts, and overactive verbal flair; instead the novels are pieced together with Reznikoff's power of clinical detail, where every detail is just as important as every action. In this paper I will examine the effectiveness and implications of this style as it relates to the novels.

The circumstances by which the publisher of Black Sparrow Press John Martin discovered Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music manuscript in 1976 makes a greater difference in the privilege of the reading:

I have recently gone through Charles Reznikoff's lifetime accumulation of manuscript, and was thunderstruck to find a carefully typed, completed novel, which he apparently never mentioned to anyone, or submitted for publication. It was, I think, composed in the early 1950's…

I believe this novel was written in response to a letter William Carlos Williams wrote Charles in the late 1940's, at a time when Charles' career was at a low ebb, urging him to continue writing at any cost, and if possible to write a novel…

(Martin, Introduction to The Manner Music, 5-6)

It is a novel about practically nothing. There is no shining protagonist, no cackling antagonist; the accepted diagram of rising action-conflict-denouement as presented in the Fichtean curve is rejected. What we have are two central characters who meet over the years: A patient listener in the form of unnamed narrator who sells clothing between the coasts and composer Jude Dalsimer. He is crude, dull, stubborn, demanding, perceptive, self-congratulating, and, at the heart of it all, human. At the novel's beginning Jude writes music for Hollywood movies; as the novel progresses, he loses his job, returns to his wife in New York, writes music privately in their cramped apartment, and ultimately by the end, wifeless and homeless, no music at all. It is as much a "Hollywood Novel" as it is a "History of the Jews Novel:" by that, it is neither. (The Manner Music, as a point of interest, may be the only novel set in Hollywood that is completely unfilmable). Reznikoff resists the plotting points of overdrive, resists the overdramatic manipulations of coincidental materializations or character in emotional penury or even the regurgitated clichés of the struggles of friendship, commitment, loyalty. And there are many opportunities for these contrivances of tension, the scene-and-summary, volley-and-serve, expectations, but they are all resisted: The minor rise and eventual loss of Jude's job in Hollywood, the failure of musical recognition, the break-up of his marriage, the infrequent and casual manner in which the narrator meets Jude, or the former's plain dislike of the music:

Jude Dalsimer may have been a great musician. I can't say for I know little about music. I know the great names, of course, that everybody knows and listen to their music with respect and sometimes with pleasure. But Jude Dalsimer's music just puzzled me. (The Manner Music, 13)

Jude seated himself at the piano and played a few notes of as disagreeable music, if it could be called that, as I ever heard. (The Manner Music, 95)

When it became clear that nothing I would hear could move me much, I stopped listening and amused myself by watching Jude's face as he played. (The Manner Music ,89)

It is also not a particularly Jewish novel. The Manner Music's primary players may all be Jewish, but their situations - sitting at the automat, drinking coffee, buying cake, listening to music, reflecting upon an occasion - are not explicitly Jewish situations. They are the situations and occasions of men within a specific time period and setting (Santa Monica and New York). Reznikoff could have exploited "a Jewish issue", and might have even penetrated this with an agency for agenda-writing with Jude's job as film composer and the history of the Jews in Hollywood, which Neal Gabler illustrates in the informative An Empire of Their Own, and who states that Hollywood "was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews who themselves seemed to be anything but the quintessence of America" and that "above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men." (Gabler, 21) The irony in the Reznikoff rejection of this is twofold: The first, Jude works, composes, and plays, in terms of musical self-agency, perfection, not as a firebrand who with fists and veins rejects the hybridization and assimilation into a gentile enterprise, and not as a powermonger who seeks the domain of power within the Anglo-Saxon elite. The second irony in Reznikoff's rejection is that the Hollywood producer, Jude's boss, Paul Pasha is presented in dignified, non-dramatic tone, but most odd - as fictitious portrayal's Hollywood producer's go - is Pasha's paternal instincts as a producer and the responsibilities he feels towards his employee:

"What will you do?" Paul asked.

Jude took his checkbook out of his pocket and tapped it. "I will draw a check and go home," he said. He felt that, if at this time he made any claims of his own, it would be annoying and useless: Paul would protect him best out of good fellowship, if he did not make his own interests an obligation of Paul's; if he did, Paul would instantly refuse to acknowledge it, and shake it off. (The Manner Music, 51)

And, as the end of their work together nears an end, Reznikoff represents Pasha's role of friend to Jude:

Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them - slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end - most likely in a week or two - they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell. (The Manner Music, 53)

(Interestingly enough, Maurice Zolotow, in his review "Newly Discovered Novel by Charles Reznikoff" in the Los Angeles Times, provides a biographical linking between Paul Pasha and Jude, as that of Hollywood writer-director-producer Albert Lewin ("8 On The Lam," "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Spawn of the North," and "China Seas" among others) and Reznikoff himself, though he could never persuade Reznikoff to write for the screen; Zolotow says: "Reznikoff lived alone in a small hotel in Santa Monica… He took a long streetcar ride to and from the studio every day… He was a determined walker and would walk for many miles on the beach." [Zolotow, 3])

So what is this novel, then, if it is not so many things? It is a novel, essentially, about seeing, about the raw, random and seemingly impressionistic psycho-sociological pieces that make men whole; its unity, its core, lies in the Joycean "individuating rhythms" of experience, of perception. The Manner Music is an accumulation of Jude's experiences as told to, and filtered through, the narrator - whose own lack of musical appreciation making him something of a fascinating unreliable narrator in an Objectivist thread; experiences which inform Jude's music, experiences which excite his sensibilities as a composer; experiences which seem to translate well into a self-referential mode of writing for the author as stated in an interview with L.S. Dembo:

This discussion about testimony and events being lived through brings me to a warning I'd like to make. I suppose I'm an "objectivist" and I have my own "formula" for writing, but no formula can be a guarantee for good writing. I think behind any poem there's a background of experience and emotion that explains its moving quality. Sometimes even the poet himself may have forgotten the background. It's a mystery. (Dembo, 107)

Of course, the artfully artless aesthetic in which Reznikoff employs - the clinical and distant exactitude of description, the lack of judgment and sentimentality, the clarity in the words, the legal brief-like fact of the matter - makes for difficult reading. No one description or action subordinates the other. The effect of this "anti-style" begs for a new manner of reading. The reader must come to terms, after so long suffering the easy falsification of "reality" in fiction, with Reznikoff's discipline of seeing, experiencing. Like Jude's fragmented, disjointed, memory music, the reading causes a strain - not as a result of prose that is shoddy, poor, weak, or even wooden, but for all the reasons the reader's sensibilities have been calibrated and perverted into accepting and expecting the fantastic, the distorted. In the influential The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth - elaborates:

"To pass judgment where the author intends neutrality is to misread. But to be neutral or objective where the author requires commitment is equally to misread, though the effect is likely to be less obvious and may even be overlooked except as a feeling of boredom." (Booth, 69)

Reznikoff's clinical technique in The Manner Music (as opposed to Family Chronicle which I will address later) is non-distracting; and it's effect, by the novel's end with Jude homeless, his stories incoherent, then finally bedded in Bellevue, will give the patient reader a greater sense of satisfaction in the formalistic unity presented: Through Jude's piecemeal and fragmentary recollections as translated objectively by the nameless narrator, and his own detachments between himself and Jude, a greater sense of humanity penetrates. Alan Lelchuk writes: "Here at the end one sees and appreciates Rezinikoff's power of sympathy, his depth in imagining an emotional scene just as earlier we admired his discipline in desentimentalizing one." (Lelchuk, 346-7)

As an indication of Reznikoff's own oral storytelling methods, he materializes as an orator just as fragmentary and apparently random. Reznikoff's skill in the unwavering voice of detail finds witness in Paul Auster's postscript to "The Decisive Moment," a loving portrait to Charles Reznikoff, where he recalls meeting him at his apartment complex on West End Avenue in New York City.

I have met some good story-tellers in my life, but Reznikoff was the best. Some of his stories that day went on for thirty or forty minutes, and no matter how far he seemed to drift from the point he was supposedly trying to make, he was in complete control. He had the patience that is necessary to the telling of a good story - and the ability to savor the least detail that cropped along the way. What at first seemed to be an endless series of digressions, a kind of aimless wandering, turned out to be the elaborate and systematic construction of a circle. (Auster, 163)

The Manner Music works with the same dedication to the systematic circle. The fragmentary nature of Jude's recollections and the unreliable narrator's filter of the recollections create, once the book is finished and some of the more frustrating passages of expectation are denied to the reader, a greater understanding of the Reznikoff technique, an anti-impressionistic technique, not a glowing whole through the sum of its images, but glowing by the justifying images presented by Jude. The book glows by the singularity of it images. Randoph Chilton, in his essay "Charles Reznikoff: Objectivist Witness" writes of the power of the Reznikoff imagistic fragments:

…in The Manner Music, an extended, complex narrative structure enfolds and completes the number, apparently disconnected details comprising Dalsimer's musical expression. It makes the quality of disjunction, of disconnectedness in these details something meaningful in itself. The images of Dalsimer's music cannot be synthesized; instead they stand solidly against one another, discrete and impenetrable. Dalsimer himself remains an enigma, an objectivist hero - we take him on his own terms, for his "own sake," because there is no other possible way to take him or to understand him

In his review of Reznikoff's novel By the Waters of Manhattan, Lionel Trilling contends that the Reznikoff method creates a more effective balance within story and unity:

Certainly it is not great prose in the sense that it is exciting or compelling. It makes no pretensions to this. Perhaps it is merely prose as we should expect at the least from every writer - each word understood and in its right place; each word saying exactly what it should say and not forced beyond its meaning. It has a quality of privacy which is startling. It has been written by a mind that… stays with itself, unintimidated by stale ways of seeing, makes public objects fresh in the freshness of its privacy. (Trilling, 374)

In The Manner Music that "quality of privacy" comes through Jude's connection with the surrounding humanity, whether directly personal or seen from a distance; he connects because he listens, he sees, and through their lives and an apparent selflessness in viewing, in hearing, captures an essence, and rewrites each experience to the language of music. In an early episode, Jude watches an interaction between a mother with her daughter and son on a streetcar. The mother tells the son he can go fishing with a friend of the family's while the daughter looks out of the window into the street. After telling the narrator the story, he plays and sings to him a piece of music. The narrator does not enjoy it, but puts on his best salesman's face, and tells him he does. The "quality of privacy" as interpreted by Jude in life and then in music, and then shared with the narrator is shown on the walk back to the streetcar.

I did not even get the chance to hint that I had time to visit the studio where he worked, for Jude talked to me all the way about the song. "I was anxious to get the little girl's loneliness into it," he said. He hummed some of the notes again and again, very well pleased.

(The Manner Music, 21)

If this is a story of seeing a series of essences, re-interpreting, re-telling, then memory, obviously, serves an important function. But it's antithetical to Bellow's memory. S. Lillian Kremer contends: "In the Bellovian universe, rejection of memory is a source of moral decay and enlightened embrace of memory is a source of spiritual and moral growth." (Kremer, 44). Reznikoff seems to reject this notion. Memory in The Manner Music is far too complex for the healing powers lame-legged nostalgia. Memory, in this representation, never extends further back than a month. Jude's memories echo E.M. Forster: "He cared chiefly for the truth of mood." (Forster, 76) Jude's compulsion to relate his piecemeal memories to his music with an exacting sense of responsibility displays - both in the economic prose and the character himself - a greater dignity to the body of the truthful present. Romantic notions have no part in his art. After hearing the origins of a three part song cycle about his wife whose titles - "The Quarrel," "Going Out," and "To Work - act as indications of the music performed - the narrator responds privately:

Jude was silent and, turning to the piano, played. I found it easier to think about what he had said than to listen to the music. Yes, it was domestic: the little quarrels that ended in a return of affection; the small comforts not without discomfort. (The Manner Music, 97)

Suddenly, however, it comes to light that, if this is a novel with no gripping conflict, only a memory-cycle, that memory itself, is both the story's suffering protagonist and insufferable antagonist. Each glimpse into Jude's mind through the narrator is a visitation into the separate, and separating, characters of memory. This memory, as both protagonist and antagonist (and in this instance one and the same), is fully realized during a visit of Jude's to Paul Pasha in the hospital after his operation:

When he would get drunk, Paul said, he would find himself reciting all the poetry he ever knew. So, after the operation, he found himself, too weak because of the shock and drugs, unable to do anything but remember; his reasoning gone but his memory, in compensation, augmented… And they all wondered if mind at first is not merely memory. (37)

The recollection is for Jude self-referential, and for the story, extremely powerful, as his own mental furniture, once so concisely arranged, becomes disarrayed and cluttered (possible paper for the New Age Critic: Feng Shui and the Mind's Chi in The Manner Music). Without the unerring truth in his manner of seeing, the music dies. Jude dies. The story must end here. In the novel's most touching paragraph where finally the reader is rewarded for enduring the detached narrative voice, and where the moment of sympathy arrives, the emotional resonance is a testament to Reznikoff's masterful precision, the narrator proclaims.

If Jude had wanted to write his music and had not done his best to do so, he might have lived longer and more pleasantly but, as he might have explained, it is as if one enlists in an army or perhaps is drafted: he must fight and may fall but may not desert…. But in the arts, and sciences, as in so many activities, not only of men but even of seeds of flowers and of trees - excuse the triteness! - many are called and few chosen.

(The Manner Music, 129)

Memory is called to bear upon Reznikoff's other out-of-print novel, Family Chronicle. It is, simply enough, the memories as told to the writer the struggle of his mother and father from Russia to America, the odyssey of peasant life to immigration, unemployment to working in the clothing trade. Memory for Reznikoff acts as self-sufficiency, a justification of existence, memory scrutinized and earned to every last detail - whether interesting or not. It is told in unwavering clinical precision, a novel that Reznikoff acolyte Milton Hindus calls "not easy reading."

But I have now read it completely through twice. It is hard going, I should add, not in the way that Finnegan's Wake is, not because it is filled with neologisms, puzzles, language games, and impenetrable complexities, but because of its seemingly absolute and artless simplicity. (Hindus, 77)

Perhaps a greater introduction to Family Chronicle is Sidney Lumet's 1965 film, "The Pawnbroker," a depiction of an angry pawnbroker running his shop New York.

Apprentice: So I gotta know one thing. So how come you people come to business so naturally?

Pawnbroker: You people? Oh, I see, yeah. I see. I see. You want to learn the secret of our success, is that right? Well, I'll tell you. First of all you start off with a period of several thousand years during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. No, my friend, you have no land to call your own, to grow food on or to hunt, you have nothing. You're never in one place long enough to have a geography, or an army, or a land myth. All you have is a little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you, to convince you that you are special, even in poverty. But this little brain that's the real key, you see. With this little brain you buy yourself a piece of cloth, you cut the cloth in two, and you go out and sell it for a penny more than you paid for it, then you run right out and buy another piece of cloth and cut it into three pieces and sell it for three pennies profit. But, my friend, during that time you must never succumb to buying an extra piece of bread for the table or toy for a child. You must immediately run out and get yourself a still larger piece of cloth and so you repeat this process over and over, and suddenly you discover something: You no longer have any desire or temptation to dig into the earth to grow food or to gaze at a limitless land to call it your own. No, no. You just go on and on and on, repeating this process over the centuries, over and over. And suddenly you make a grand discovery: You have a mercantile heritage, you are a merchant, you are known as a usurer, a man with sacred resources, a witch, a pawnbroker, a sheeny, a mockie, and a kike!

The anger and emotional turmoil of the pawnbroker is essentially the anger and emotional turmoil that Reznikoff's parents do not display, Reznikoff rejects this anger, a melodramatic device, a flair in the film (with corresponding lachrymose violins for added atmosphere). Their display is simply the persistence of work, an ideal to succeed. The pawnbroker's speech is powerful because he, like the Reznikoffs is never comfortably successful, only partially padded with his savings; the speech also evokes an unusable past, a past in a nomadic blur, a past accumulating to a survivalist's present, and a present of misunderstood, damaging labeling. Family Chronicle displays the years of the Reznikoffs "repeating the process" of cutting cloth and struggling for a profit, sometimes successful, but for the most part struggling. In their Russian years, they saw America not as a promise land, not as a Zionist utopia, but as a slightly better opportunity for money. In an intereview with Reinhold Schiffer, Reznikoff explains the immigration process as he understood it through his parents - after writing and working on the manuscript for over four decades: "This marvelous country they're walking through, and suddenly the reality, [it is] no more real than the trees." (Schiffer, 118). The novel's first two chapters are "authored" by his father and mother, but their authorship is simply a structural device.

Eric Homberger writes:

By the 1920s Charles Reznikoff's parents were unwell and showing their ages… Late in her life, suffering from asthma, Sarah Reznikoff tried to learn to write English. The narratives were transcribed from his parents' conversation but show a lack of Yiddish inflection. This may be due to the fact that the family was Yiddish-speaking. Their family stories would have been recounted in Yiddish, not English Family Chronicle translates Nathan's and Sarah's Yiddish into standard English, not a comic jargon much favored by writers like Montague Glass, Bruno Lessing, and Milt Gross, who in the public's mind constituted Jewish writing.

(Homberger, 328)

The novel is divided into three sections, three narratives. Mother Sarah Reznikoff's "Early History of a Seamstress," the story of her family life in Elizavetrgrad, then to Dimitrefka; meeting Nathan Reznikoff; her move to America; their non-romantic coupling and marriage; their moving from one room to another, one apartment to the next; and their struggles to find work. Father Nathan Reznikoff's "Early History of a Sewing Machine Operator" tells essentially the same story with the same tone: Family, moving, Sarah, America, room to room, apartment to apartment, job to job. The novel ends with Charles Reznikoff's "Needle Trade," which picks up where his father's narrative ends. In this chapter we see the Reznikoffs finally finding success with their own business, the Artistic Millinery Company, only to lose the business by a fire which burns a hole in the floor and roof. There proceeds a long legal process between the Reznikoffs and their landlord which finally exhausts them. The book ends with the two of them still struggling for week, and ultimately to his mother's death. The novel ends with Charles taking a walk:

A week or so after the funeral, I was taking a walk. When I came to where the Artistic Millinery Company had been, the buildings were gone: torn down to make room for a wider but no less dingy street.

(Family Chronicle, 311)

The effect of the narrative troika lies in its simplistic cunning: Reznikoff the writer allows us not the psychological detail or mental equipment of his mother and father (none at all, really, which makes the book for even more difficult reading), but the facts and events seen by both mother and father.

The stylistic differentiation between them is inadequate, but he shifts of emphasis between narratives, the differences of recollections and opposing judgments, nicely reveal the contrasting temperaments of the Reznikoff family. Omitted from the story, for reasons unspecified, was a younger son who went on to graduate school from New York University and who attended Cornell Medical School (Homberger, 329)

In essence, it is left to the reader's memory to understand the differences between mother and father. Details which are important to Nathan are unimportant and unmentioned by Sarah - and vice versa - provide a between-the-lines psychological make-up of these two. It is a powerful tool, a tool still linked to Trilling's assessment of Reznikoff's "quality of privacy." The accounts will be different, of course; but it is the differences which make for the careful reader a rewarding experience.

The most powerful and dramatic difference in their respective narratives is the night of their engagement in America. Sidling their narratives as opposing blocks serves a greater understanding of the characters.

(Sarah Reznikoff's narrative)

In the meantime we reached the bridge. We found a bench and rested. The air was cool and refreshing. Nathan went on to say he would not marry until he had save some money and could go into business for himself. I said he was right and he would do well for he had a good head on his shoulders. "Well then," he said, "good luck to us!" and took my hand.

"What are you talking about?" I managed to say.

"Have you anything against me?"

"Nothing, but this is no match for you. You know how poor I am, and I must help my family too…"

At last we agreed to say nothing to anyone until Nathan had the consent of his father and mother. "In the meantime," I said, "you will have enough time to make up your mind. Nobody need know, and if you change your mind, nobody will be hurt." We came home late. The night was so hot no one could sleep, and in the morning each of us went to our work.

(Family Chronicle, 84)

And opposing this is Nathan Reznikoff's version of the night:

After supper I asked Sarah Yetta to walk with me on the Brooklyn Bridge. When we came to the second bench we sat down. Sarah Yetta was looking at the moon and I at her. At last I said, "I think you feel as I do - it is hard to be a boarder. Don't you think I ought to get married?" She did not answer, and I went on. "I have been thinking about it a long time and now I want to hear what you think."

"I believe it will be a good thing for you," she said slowly. "Her family will help you."

"You don't understand me. Whom do you think I mean? I mean you."

"Don't you think you are making a mistake? You had better think it over."

"I am sure that I am not making a mistake, but maybe you are afraid you will make a mistake. If so, it is for you to think it over."

Sarah Yetta saw that I was nettled and said gently, "I never thought you were talking about me. I thought it was of Shura, Aaron's daughter. As far as money goes she is a much better match but if you want me, I am satisfied. May we be lucky," and we kissed for the first time since we knew each other.

(Family Chronicle, 188)

How interesting that their respective dialogues are completely different. And how telling is it that Nathan mentions the kiss while Sarah only describes them as sitting in silence!

Yet, the engagement, like everything else in the novel is played down to the effect of a monochromatic narrative.

Reznikoff is uncompromising in his adherence to his own ideas of what makes for literature, and there are no concessions at all to the spirit of journalism in his book. He is not anecdotal; he stubbornly tones down everything that even remotely suggests the melodramatic and sensational. He narrates every incident in the same restrained muffled tone, and he avoids every temptation to be pointed in his telling of his little tales. He studiedly and purposefully flattens them almost completely out.

(Hindus, 79)

Eric Homberger agrees with Hindus. Both seem baffled by the novel's insistent flatness and painful execution of seemingly random events.

Family Chronicle tells, in considerable detail, a story which is neither romantic, colorful, nor heroic. The Reznikoffs were by most standards ordinary people. Their story lacks mystery or glamour… to an audience accustomed to identify the heroic with such qualities, it offers little of immediate interest… Family Chronicle affords no such pleasure. It is written in a style which is unadorned to the point of plainness. Neither Sarah nor Nathan are given to psychological introspection: their lives are dominated by work and the more romantic aspirations towards self-fulfillment have been thoroughly repressed in their personalities… Family Chronicle is a book for which there is no familiar literary category. A memoir, in a sense; a novel, too, in the form of a memoir; a non-fiction novel, with, one assumes, a certain amount of invented or freely summarized conversation. (Homberger, 340)

In a strange way, the reader begins to realize that there is no drama in the telling, only the telling; there is no desire to resolve, only the stature of resolution, a meeting ground of comfort, perhaps. The Reznikoffs die working, and even death is treated with the same color gray as business deals or apartment prices.

Grandmother became sick and the doctor said she had not long to live. We wrote to Grandfather. But when she became better, he went away again. And then she died. Gather, too, was not at home for the funeral. (Family Chronicle, 39)

Grandfather wrote letters to his friends and had us call the head of the burial committee. He told him where he wished to be buried and they agreed upon the cost of the funeral. Then he called my father to his bedside and said, "The day I close my eyes you must take my fur hat, my new clothes, and what is left of my money and send it to Moses, my youngest son. He is worse off than the rest of you." The next day he died. (Family Chronicle, 49)

Both Sarah and Nathan have themed their lives with the toils of work. Whether working as a foreman, or as an independent seamstress, or working to simply find work, their narratives are unified by a blandness or indifference towards life and death, friendship and enmity, religion and rejection (it is most definitely not a novel concerned with its own Jewishness), because work remains the only part of life in which they can depend. Death, then can only be commented upon by what seems to be a cold heart: It is outside of what they have learnt; there is no time for mourning, for resting on one's laurels, for joy, for weeping. As Sarah is advised by her father: '"You must be satisfied with things as they are. Work and be content.'" (Family Chronicle, 43).

Family Chronicle is a privilege not because it is forgotten and out-of-print (that is a far different privilege only satisfying my own elitist's level of readership), but because of its adherence to finally something close to a Chekhovian point of objectivity, or non-judgment:

You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.

When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story. (Chekhov, 1447)

As Milton Hindus describes it, Reznikoff believed "that which is rejected by the editor… as not newsworthy, the run-of-the-mill occurrences of everyday life, challenge the true literary artist to bring out their latent interest." (Hindus, 6) Reznikoff, with his legal background, is concerned not with judgments and not with his own editorializing, but with stating the case correctly.

It was hard to run two machines in the little room we were in. We asked Mrs. Fertel to find another flat with a larger room for us. She found a place for seventeen dollars a month and wanted us to pay her twenty-one. We were willing. Then she wanted us to work in the kitchen that she might have the best room for a parlor. But we could not let her have her way. (Family Chronicle, 194)

Reznikoff's writing, the piecemeal blocks of character through seemingly random events and details is akin to his own stability and process as a man in the city. In the aforementioned loving portrait by Paul Auster, he describes Reznikoff's long walks: "The important thing, he explained, was not to walk too fast. Only by forcing himself to keep to a pace of less than two miles per hour could he be sure to see everything he wanted to see." (Auster, 164) Auster's own fiction in White Spaces evokes the Reznikovian method of walking and writing into one, the strength of one step, the strength of one word:

I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real. (Auster, 107)

Strangely, the novel as it is being read becomes something much like walking, one foot in front of another, one word in front of the other; strangely the novel - a novel about working - becomes itself, so unselfconscious of itself as it tries to be, a work, a struggle in itself. Nathan and Sarah's pragmatism is represented by the pragmatism of the prose; the pragmatism of the prose becomes the pragmatism to continue reading. Reznikoff's aesthetic, which is seemingly devoid of an aesthetic claim or pursuit, becomes unwittingly as glaring as the stylistic and melodramatic evil that it seeks to reject. In a sense, its tone has the feel of a post-modern novel - much like Auster's White Spaces - a novel concerned only with itself, contained in itself, by itself. The anger of the pawnbroker is an obvious and justified anger. That the Reznikoffs display neither anger nor joy is an oddity. That the last thirty-five pages of Sara Reznikoff's narrative gives exacting detail of moving from one job to another, from one room to the next, from the differences in pay and rent - but not however her emotional responses or her degrees of attitude - is also an oddity. That Hindus compares Family Chronicle to Finnegan's Wake seems, as the novel progresses, and once the reader has come to terms that there is to be no resolution (for there is no grand fiasco in which to resolve) that this comparison is just and bizarrely qualified. Its style may fall under an Objectivist heading, but as the literary trajectory widens and swells, Family Chronicle enters nicely into Beckett's universe. In his curious essay "Dante..Bruno.Vico..Joyce," Beckett writes of the frustrations with content and form:

Here is direct expression - pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension." (Beckett, 13).

In an fascinatingly inconsistent paragraph, Reznikoff himself invokes the reader in a single instance to come to terms with the difficult impartiality, the difficult details of this style:

At this point the impatient reader, particularly if he is sure of dinner and bed this night and for many nights to come, may ask sternly: Was this right? Had they the right to copy the hat they were given to make and to undersell, as they certainly would, the house that had kindly given it? (Family Chronicle, 242)

Reznikoff admits the story's brave consistency of objectivity by positing the reader into the manuscript. If the reader is to take into account Paul Jennings' 'res-sistentialism,' Family Chronicle reads like a compendium of objects and things, a systematic nouveau roman of pricing sewing machines, figuring the design for ladies hats and skirts, and the differences between a loft store on a front-street and a store on the groundfloor of a sidestreet. Matters such as plot curves or character analyses seem here easily dispensable; Reznikoff quintessential concern is the depiction of work, of struggle, persistence, patience. Walking: One foot in front of the other and the hope that the other foot behind will follow.

Work Cited

Auster, Paul. White Spaces. New York: Talman Company, 1980.

Auster, Paul. "The Decisive Moment," Hindus, Milton, ed. Charles Reznikoff: Man and

Poet. Orono: University of Maine, 1984.

Beckett, Samuel. "Dante..Bruno.Vico..Joyce," in Our Exagimation round his

Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1929.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Chekhov, Anton. "Technique in Writing the Short Story," Charters, Ann, ed.

The Story and Its Writer. Boston: Bedford, 1999.

Chilton, Randolph. "Charles Reznikoff: Objectivist Witness," Hindus, Milton, ed.

Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono: University of Maine, 1984.

Dembo, L.S. "A Talk with Charles Reznikoff," Hindus, Milton, ed. Charles Reznikoff:

Man and Poet. Orono: University of Maine, 1984.

Forster, E.M. A Passage To India. New York: Harcourt, 1924

Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood. New

York: Anchor, 1989.

Hindus, Milton. "Charles Reznikoff's Chronicle," Midstream, November 1972, pgs 77-

80.

Homberger, Eric. "Charles Reznikoff's Family Chronicle: Saying Thank You and I'm

Sorry," Hindus, Milton, ed. Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono: University of Maine, 1984.

Kremer, S. Lillian. "Memoir and History: Saul Bellow's Old Men Remembering in 'Mostby's Memoirs,' 'The Old System,' and The Bellarosa Connection:" Saul Bellow Journal 12.1 (1994): pgs. 44-58.

Lelchuk, Alan. "Against the Grain: Reznikoff's The Manner Music," Hindus, Milton, ed.

Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Orono: University of Maine, 1984.

Reznikoff, Charles. Family Chronicle. New York: Markus Wiener, 1963.

Reznikoff, Charles. The Manner Music. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977.

The Pawnbroker. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Perf. Rod Steiger, Brock Peters, and Jaime Sanchez. Landau-Unger, 1965.

Zolotow, Maurice. "Newly discovered Hollywood novel by Charles Reznikoff," Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1973, pg 3.