Category: Literary Pathography
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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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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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Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels
Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto. I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself. Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon…
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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.)…
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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?…