D. G. Myers remembered. Top o' the Stack.
Category: Literary Matters
Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand
Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's "Jack-hammering":
Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)
My posts on Miss Rand are collected here.
Here is Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Miss O'Connor is exaggerating, but she is essentially correct in her literary judgment. Both women are firm adherents of worldviews that inform their novels, and in the case of O'Connor, short stories.
The difference is that . . . well, you tell me what the difference is. Why do I have to do all the work?
Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti
From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me. It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'
The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.
Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism
Top o' the Stack
Oriana Fallaci on Writing
From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:
I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.
This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!
Isn’t It Morally Sick to Enjoy Killing?
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.'
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.