Category: Literary Matters
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Two Types of Humanity: The Mystic and the Profligate
Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104: Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute; but,…
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Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957
It arrived yesterday evening, and I am already 32 pages into it. Why keep a journal? Green gives an answer on page one in the entry from 4 December 1928. He tells of "the incomprehensible desire to bring the past to a standstill that makes one keep a diary." Reading that, I knew I would…
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Family Life with the Cheever’s
I'm sure family life has its compensations. But it is not for everybody. I live with an angelic wife and two black cats. All four of us will die without issue. My contact with relatives is minimal. Blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and in some cases the…
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The Journals of John Cheever
Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one.…
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Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again?
A Substack tribute to "Sweet Gone Jack" 55 years gone.
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Misremembering Kerouac
An article from The Guardian.
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Robert Giroux
Catholic bookman and editor of Merton, Kerouac, Flannery O' Connor, and Walker Percy, to name just four.
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Three American Sophomores
The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac. On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example: Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when…
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More on ‘Baron’ Corvo
A. J. A. Symon's Quest for Corvo (1934) has me in its grip. It is an intriguing exercise in literary pathography whose subject is an English eccentric of the first magnitude. I'm on p. 222. Today I came across a high-class literary site, The Yellow Nineties, whereat I read this entry about our man. Thanks…
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Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers
I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable, I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side. And then I…
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Word of the Day: Triolet
Here: An eight-line stanza having just two rhymes and repeating the first line as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line as the eighth. See Sandra McPherson’s “Triolet” or “Triolets in the Argolid” by Rachel Hadas. Return The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. I recall each savor; the taste is…
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Sub-distinguishing the lie?
What does "sub-distinguishing the lie" mean in the following passage from A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB, 2001, p. 73): He [Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. 'Baron Corvo'] was wont to condemn the alleged laxity of the Roman Communion in the matter of truthfulness, and its sub-distinguishing the lie. He…
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Reading Now: The Blake Bailey Bio of Charles Jackson
Bailey has been called the literary biographer of his generation. That strikes me as no exaggeration. He is fabulously good and his productivity is astonishing with stomping tomes on Richard Yates, Charles Jackson, John Cheever, and Philip Roth. I have yet to find a bad sentence in the two I've read. Jackson's main claim to…
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“Murder Your Darlings”
Good advice. I should take it. I am too enamored of my own formulations, which I tend to repeat. Anthony Flood, a hard-working editor who is doing some editing for me, just sent me this: The phrase "murder your darlings" is often attributed to the English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He used a…