The above reads like the sophistry of a morally sick old man, full of himself, a drunkard, who blew his brains out at the age of 60, a man who kept a list of the men he killed and the women he 'had.'
Category: Literary Matters
Eugene O’Neill
A tortured soul if ever there was one. A soul in torment lacking the sense to know that saucing the mix with John Barleycorn is like pouring gasoline on a fire barely contained but eager to engulf house and home, wife and child.
Dowling's biography's another pathography. Well-spent a scholarly life digging through dirty laundry? My time well-spent inspecting the soiled rags?
Paul Brunton on Eugene O’Neill
The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 7, Healing of the Self, p. 50:
The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O'Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the gaunt tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brought him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore the fact that he was an ultrasensitive man — so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely within himself.
I recall reading "Desire Under the Elms" as a college freshman, but since then nothing else by or about the Irish-American playwright. A few days ago the Brunton passage decided me to buy Robert M. Dowling's biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, Yale University Press, 2014. Outstanding! Reads like a novel. What a character that besotted playwright was! I will have something to say later about his strange and incoherent sense of life. It will anger some literary types.
Drunkards seem 'over-represented' among literary writers. Wokesters need to address this 'inequity.'
William Faulkner on Privacy
Harper's Magazine, 1955.
The Dialogue Form
Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus:
The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students touting “equity” versus equality, “affirmative action” and racial preferences versus equal treatment, the history of the founding of the United States versus the 1619 Project, the quandary of “reparations,” and so on.
From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac
I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:
I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers. Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.” Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”
Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books. Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”
I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”
Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect? One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties. Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.
But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.
While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me. Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories like this:
Here is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus with his mother:
Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.
Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.
Two-Fisted Self-Pity: Anatole Broyard’s Review of Richard Yates, YOUNG HEARTS CRYING
In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador 2003), pp. 529-541, with special attention to Broyard's trenchant and somewhat mean-spirited review. Yates made it as a novelist; despite his considerable literary promise, Broyard never did and his envy shows.
Broyard was quite a character, "the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade" (Bailey, 201, quoting a former girlfriend of Broyard) and "the only spade among the Beat Generation” as he is described here. A light-skinned black, he tried to pass himself off as white.
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Anatole Broyard is an editor of The Book Review.
YOUNG HEARTS CRYING
By Richard Yates. 347 pp. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press. $16.95.
THERE seems to be an element of relief in some of the critical praise given to the novels and short stories of Richard Yates. William Styron called ''Revolutionary Road,'' Yates's first novel, ''classic'' and Ann Beattie used the same word for ''Liars in Love,'' his second collection of stories. ''Realistic'' and ''craft'' are two more terms that are often applied to his work. The way these words are used is interesting: they are the visible half of an implicit opposition, suggesting that most novels and stories are not so conspicuously classical, realistic and well crafted.
Mr. Yates is seen as turning the tide, or holding the line, against a general moral and esthetic deterioration. We know where we are with him: in the American mainstream. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are waving from the banks of the stream and they can be heard in Mr. Yates's pages. Like Hemingway's heroes, Mr. Yates's male protagonists worry about their masculinity and talk at length about the integrity of art. Like Fitzgerald's men, they care about style and status and drink a lot to keep up their courage.
Mr. Yates's heroes are classical in the nature of their adversary relation to culture, for it's not the war in Vietnam or the civil rights struggle that arouses their moral indignation, but the mediocrity, emptiness and conformity – all Mr. Yates's words – of American life itself. When, in ''Revolutionary Road,'' Frank Wheeler talks of throwing up his job at the Knox Business Machine Company and ''finding himself'' in Europe, he is closer to Henry Miller and the expatriates of the 1920's than to the people of John Updike, John Cheever or Donald and Frederick Barthelme. In fact, he may be closer to Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.
Some Very Good Masters
Come May, I will have been on a Richard Yates jag for a year. What follows is my correction of the digitized version of Yates' essay "Some Very Good Masters" which first appeared in The New York Times on 19 April 1981. Yates explains what he learned about writing from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. He also supplies examples of T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative."
This article is credited with bringing Yates out of literary eclipse.
More Yates quotations here.
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IT must have been the movies of the 1930's more than any other influence that got me into the habit of thinking like a writer. I wasn't a bookish child; reading was such hard work for me that I avoided it whenever possible. But I wasn't exactly the rough-and ready type either, and so the movies filled a double need: They gave me an awful lot of cheap story material and a good place to hide.
When I was about 14, I started submitting movie-haunted stories to my English teachers, as if to prove there was something I could do, but it wasn't until three or four years later that reading, both fiction and poetry, began to sweep the movies into a dark and vaguely shameful corner of my mind, where they have remained ever since. I almost never go to a movie now, and have been known to explain loftily, if not quite at the top of my lungs, that this is because movies are for children.
Kent Haruf
I caught a glimpse of an intriguing title the other day, "Our Souls at Night." What a great title, I thought. So I picked up the novel whose title it is, by an author I had never heard of, and began to read. I was not impressed at first, but put off by the spare writing, overly simple and flat-footed and awkward as if by intention. If some writing is 'mannered,' this, the second paragraph, struck me as 'anti-mannered':
They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses. It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the the trees and turned in at Louis's house.
Turned off cool? Next sentence: turned in?
Perhaps my preciosity is showing. Or I am just quibbling. But I read on, and was sucked in. A good novelist has the power to draw the reader into his world and keep him there, page after page. But I am only 30 pages in, so no more commentary from me. Let the author speak. He tells his story in The Making of a Writer. A fine piece of writing. A couple of passages struck me. The first helps explain Haruf's simple style.
During that period of my life out on the high plains, I was more or less a happy kid, I think, and I survived childhood with only a few hard lessons that I still remember. One was: don’t you be a show-off, and I have tried to abide by that injunction ever since, with all its contradictions and complications.
And here he makes a point I have often made:
If I had learned anything over those years of work and persistence, it was that you had to believe in yourself even when no one else did. And later I often said something like that to my graduate students. You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence. I felt as though I had a little flame of talent, not a big talent, but a little pilot-light-sized flame of talent, and I had to tend to it regularly, religiously, with care and discipline, like a kind of monk or acolyte, and not to ever let the little flame go out.
I would put it like this: You have to believe in yourself beyond the evidence, evidence which, in the beginning, is insufficient to justify belief in one's powers. Take that, W. K. Clifford.
Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats
Still 'jacking off' in December? Well, when I find something relevant I snag it for my files. The bit about Jack's saintly & sickly older brother Gerard in this chapter of a book by Barry Miles caught my eye re: my response to Vito C. , so here it is, below the fold.
Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?
Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.
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The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.
From Scott Beauchamp's review:
The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.
I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer, a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am. And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature? We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:
I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)
Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac.
And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy!
Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).
Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.
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*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage' and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"
Addendum. Vito Caiati writes,
I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton: “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes, when speaking of monks extra muros, “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place, They do not support the trip.”Vito,Very good observation.While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all? Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk?I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton. As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post.But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end? I don't imagine you have an English trans.It is always good to hear from you.
Faith Animated by Doubt
A living faith is animated by doubt. Faith dies when it hardens into a subjective certainty and a moribund complacency. I have had this thought for years. Each time I re-enact it, it strikes me as true. I was pleased to discover recently that T. S. Eliot holds the same or a very similar view:
'For people of intellect I think that doubt is inevitable,' Eliot once told an interviewer. The doubter is a man who takes the problem of his faith seriously.'
The quotation is from the outstanding 712 pp. biography by Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, W. W. Norton & Co, 1998, p. 112.
Doubt, the engine of inquiry, is the purifier of the quest for contact with that which lies beyond inquiry.
A Lit-Crit Fest
At My Facebook page. I posed the question whether JOHN BARTH is worth reading. 29 comments and counting.
Kerouac No Role Model
Lest I lead astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty-bound to point out that my annual October focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated. Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s. Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being.
I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago. (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.) Ah yes, here it is. I am in basic agreement with it.
Kerouac’s Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross
A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things.
What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010:
The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:
Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality. I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes. I hope it will all turn out true.
It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:
Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.