Since the Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded, the cold water splashed in the face of Jeffrey Meyer's Damned to fame: the Nobel Prize for Literature (The Article) should be read. There are problems with any award system, but I found the Nobel Prize winners a better education than the Pulitzer winners. A Dylan fan, I would have preferred Philip Roth to have gotten the Nobel. I read a long time ago that Dreiser should have gotten the Nobel instead of Sinclair Lewis - it would have improved Dreiser's writing by giving him confidence, while winning ruined Lewis. There may be more than a little truth that the Nobel embalms the living, but I think there are exceptions to that: Toni Morrison, Eugene O'Neill, and J.M. Coetzee. Where I find real quality is the National Book Awards (for Americans) and the Booker (for the rest of the world).
Is English literature dying - I know this should not even matter when we are destroying the planet, but if we are to survive as a species, we need our arts:
The third issue of The Indianapolis Review is out!
While in prison, I read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and I heard him interviewed on an NPR show. I liked the novel and I liked how he talked. What I did not know until after he died that he wrote one of my favorite movies, Smoke. He died last year.
Regarding Auster, I ran across RIP: an author, an artist on failbetter, and took this away:
...We recall with a certain degree of excitement and trepidation a time more than two decades ago detailing the impact of the internet on storytelling and story tellers, and are forever grateful to him for being one of our first author interviews. So, to our readers today, we implore you to read his books… and remember his words.
He is worth reading, and he is worth listening to about writing. On YouTube, I found the following videos.
(Some views on The Long Goodbye, that I could not resist adding here
The Long Goodbye at 70 (Sam Wiebe)
Published in 1953, The Long Goodbye is a bloated, meandering and sentimental book containing the world’s worst gimlet recipe. It’s also arguably the finest crime novel by an American.
Unsurprisingly, The Long Goodbye is also the last great Marlowe novel. Chandler broke something with that one.
I don’t really think Marlowe cares all that much about the Sternwood family, Bogart and Bacall’s chemistry aside. He’s not personally involved in Moose Malloy’s search for Velma, or the Quest family, or the Brasher Doubloon. But poor pitiful Terry Lennox gets to him, and that betrayal signals the end.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, book of a lifetime (The Independent) by Benjamin Black (who is John Banville)
Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work. In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of "mere" thriller-writer.
He complained repeatedly and with bitterness against highbrow critics, such as Edmund Wilson, who failed to see, Chandler believed, the artistry and stylistic polish of his work. In fact, Chandler was valued and praised, far more than he acknowledged: as a serious drunk, he preferred martyrdom to stardom.
The Argentinean novelist Rodrigo Fresán suggests that throughout the seven novels in which he figures, Marlowe truly falls in love with only one person, the ambiguous and gentlemanly Terry Lennox, a subtle variation on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. That Lennox turns out to be a scoundrel is not the point; the point is Marlowe's confused and melancholy love for him.
It’s a long drag back from Brooklyn and one of the dullest in the city. Sometimes I’ll catch myself narrating life to myself this way, like I’ve just flicked away my cigarette, pulled up my collar, like I can still feel the day-old hangover crawling around silent and sluggish in the back of my head like a bad dream, and oh my God I’m doing it again, aren’t I? But that’s just the price we pay for reading The Long Goodbye.
I’ve read it almost half a dozen times. Certain chapters much more than that. And I’ve nearly memorized the last page, which, after all this time I still think is one of the best last pages ever written. And still, I don’t entirely know what to make of this book.
If Raymond Chandler’s earlier novels were detective stories that just so happened to be good, The Long Goodbye is a full reversal; it is a great novel that just so happens to be a detective story. It should be no different than saying Moby-Dick is a great novel that happens to be about whalers, or that Ulysses is a great novel that happens to take place in Dublin. But by describing it as detective fiction, we can obscure the fact for more than 60 years that it was one of the greatest novels ever written in America. There is hardly a novel more human, more heartbreaking, strung together with prose as boozily and as meticulously exacting as The Long Goodbye’s.
***
The real story, however, to very sloppily paraphrase Raymond Chandler, is about the greatest mystery of all, the mystery that is the human heart, set against what is perhaps the greatest topographical enigma of all: The City at night. What could possibly be more uniquely American than rolling highway, dry wind up in the canyon, dim headlights refracting across the streets of Los Angeles?
***
I have a theory that the great American Tough Guy is a myth—that he never existed and was dreamed up only to address some massive vulnerability in the national construction of self, almost like a superhero. Marlowe exposed him as a total sham. The brokenness that Marlowe carries, which is suggested but never addressed—a device that is the equivalent of gymnastics almost to the point of magic on Chandler’s part—is infinitely more American. The French can say bof all they want, and Italians have their mercurial shrugs and ironic, fatalistic hand gestures, but carrying brokenness to the point of near toxicity, for better although almost certainly for worse, is what we do in America, as Americans. That’s our thing. And Marlowe laid it bare for all the world to see.
The Edgar Awards Revisited: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (Best Novel; 1955) (Criminal Element)
Raymond Chandler. The name carries so much weight in the mystery genre, it’s hard to believe anyone who says they’ve never read any of his works. But I hadn’t. Like much of popular culture, after a certain time, the details are everywhere—reviewed, rebooted, interpreted, and imitated. I knew Philip Marlowe through and through without having read a single word. (Similarly, I hadn’t seen any of the Star Wars films until my 20s but could hold my own in any conversation about the films.)
It’s a shame that things get put on a pedestal like that because the expectations always overreach and cause an expectation for more. And that’s exactly what happened when I read Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (and watched the Star Wars films, for that matter).
Oh, yes, I have misread the novel, for however much I agree as a detective novel it is bloated and meanders. It is that meandering that takes into the territory of the plain novel.)
Bulgakov’s novel has so many layers that it defies easy interpretation. But underlying its many twists and turns there is nevertheless a simple, if chilling message: that in times of upheaval, when the past fragments and even memory fails, it is the historian’s curse to write fictions which are true, but which no one believes except madmen and the devil.
Reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita broke down my resistance to the Russian novel. It is also an example for me of how to approach the madness of reality in a novel by using a madness of its own - the imagination.
Let us not forget the theater: Reviving a forgotten playwright for a new era (Sheffield Hallam University). The playwright in question is John Ford, a Jacobean playwright. Jacobean is the era that came after the Elizabethan. I have been interested in Jacobean revenge tragedies, but have only managed to read The Duchess of Malfi. More reading, still not done.
For some fun: The Duchess [of Malfi] review – Jodie Whittaker trapped in Tarantinoesque revenge tragedy
John Webster’s revenge tragedy contains a terrible timelessness. To modernise this story of a woman who refuses to be submissive and is killed by her brothers for it is to highlight the eternal relevance of male domestic violence, even against a figure as powerful as Webster’s wealthy duchess.
Zinnie Harris’s updated version from 2019, taking place in an indistinct present with swearing and sex alongside some 17th-century formalities, makes hard-hitting points on the sociopathic reasoning for murderous misogyny. But it is too much of a melange of tone and ideas. Jodie Whittaker, returning to the stage after more than a decade’s absence, gives a spirited leading performance but is hamstrung by the strangeness of Harris’s own production.
A Slaughterhouse-Five lecture that I think escapes the tedious, life-draining exercises of most academics. This fellow seems to have actually liked reading Vonnegut's novel, and just as much liked teaching it.
Sherwood Anderson is one of those American writers I think is more talked about than read. Having read a little of his biography in prison, it seems to me that bad luck and stubbornness may led him into obscurity. Winesburg, Ohio is his most-cited work; I knew much of it without having read it. When I did read it during my stay in prison, it was both much of what I expected (on the macro level) and a surprise (at the micro level of the stories themselves). There is some of him in my stories about Jackson, Indiana - and several differences that are also rooted in his book.
A documentary on the man:
Having written the paragraph above, I was struck by a mixture of curiosity and procrastination. What was it that I read about him that underlies my opinion? The results from a cursory Google search follows:
Sherwood Anderson: a room of his own by James Tuttleton (New Criterion, 1987) is behind a paywall, so I went to onto the book being reviewed there, Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. And kept hitting paywalls. What I could discern was that Townsend had written the most recent biography - in 1987.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON: SHORT-STORY LEGEND (Arizona Daily Sun) was the first without a paywall, and might catch some of what I read years and years ago.
Between World War I and World War II, Anderson helped to shatter formulaic approaches to writing, influencing a subsequent generation of writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Anderson, who lived in New Orleans for a brief time, befriended Faulkner there in 1924 and encouraged him to write about his home county in Mississippi.
***
Anderson’s first novel, “Windy McPherson’s Son,” published in 1916 through the efforts of Theodore Dreiser and Floyd Dell, is an autobiographical work about a young man’s success in the business world that he later rejects. Anderson’s 1919 collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, is considered his finest work.
In 1921, Anderson met writer Gertrude Stein, whose innovative writing influenced his development as a young writer.
Anderson later wrote in the autobiographical “A Story Teller’s Story” that the occasion of his reading Stein’s “Tender Buttons” perhaps was the first time he “really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself at its best.”
A brief survey of the short story part 51: Sherwood Anderson (The Guardian)
Even as Anderson's once-great reputation plummeted, the book, published in 1919, continued to exert a pronounced effect on the American short story throughout the 20th century. His prose carries flavours of Whitman and Twain, and the distinctive, comma-rejecting rhythm of Gertrude Stein. Above them you detect those he influenced: the Hemingway of In Our Time, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver among many others. Sometimes he writes very badly, but when he writes well his discursive style envelops you completely, without fanfare.
***
Anderson wrote the vast majority of his good work between 1916 and 1926, and most of his readers had abandoned him years before his unfortunate death in 1941 (he developed peritonitis after swallowing a cocktail stick). But regardless of his inconsistencies and his long decline, stories such as I Want to Know Why (1919), I'm a Fool (1922) and the problematic but brilliant Death in the Woods (1933) demand to be read by any lover of the form. There's plenty to explore beyond Winesburg's city limits.
Sherwood Anderson: An appreciation by William Faulkner (The Atlantic), but here I have a subscription:
At this time in his life, he had to believe this. His mother had been a bound girl, his father a day laborer; this background had taught him that the amount of security and material success which he had attained was, must be, the answer and end to life. Yet he gave this up, repudiated and discarded it at a later age, when older in years than most men and women who make that decision, to dedicate himself to art, writing. Yet, when he made the decision, he found himself to be only a oneor two-book man. He had to believe that, if only he kept that style pure, then what the style contained would be pure too, the best. That, was why he had to defend the style. That was the reason for his hurt and anger at Hemingway about Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, and at me in a lesser degree since my fault was not full booklength but instead was merely a privately-printed and -subscribed volume which few people outside our small New Orleans group would ever see or hear about, because of the book of Sprat ling’s caricatures which we titled Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles and to which I wrote an introduction in Anderson’s primer-like style. Neither of us — Hemingway or I —could have touched, ridiculed, his work itself. But we had made his style look ridiculous; and by that time, after Dark Laughter, when he had reached the point where he should have stopped writing, he had to defend that style at all costs because he too must have known by then in his heart that there was nothing else left.
***
I learned more than that from him, whether or not I always practised the rest of it any more than I have that. I learned that, to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born; that to be an American and a writer, one does not necessarily have to pay lip-service to any conventional American image such as his and Dreiser’s own aching Indiana or Ohio or Iowa corn or Sandburg’s stockyards or Mark Twain’s frog. You had only to remember what you were. “You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn,”he told me. “it dont matter where it was, just so you remember it and aint ashamed of it. Because one place to start from is just as important as any other. You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from. But that’s all right too. It’s America too; pull it out, as little and unknown as it is, and the whole thing will collapse, like when you prize a brick out of a wall.”
“Not a cemented, plastered wall,” I said.
“Yes, but America aint cemented and plastered yet. They’re still building it. That’s why a man with ink in his veins not only still can but sometimes has still got to keep on moving around in it, keeping moving around and listening and looking and learning. That’s why ignorant unschooled fellows like you and me not only have a chance to write, they must write. All America asks is to look at it and listen to it and understand it if you can. Only the understanding aint important either: the important thing is to believe in it even if you dont understand it, and then try to tell it, put it down. It wont ever be quite right, but there is always next time; there’s always more ink and paper, and something else to try to understand and tell. And that one probably wont be exactly right either, but there is a next time to that one, too. Because tomorrow America is going to be something different, something more and new to watch and listen to and try to understand; and, even if you cant understand, believe.”
To believe, to believe in the value of purity, and to believe more. To believe not in just the value, but the necessity for fidelity and integrity; lucky is that man whom the vocation of art elected and chose to be faithful to it, because the reward for art does not wait on the postman. He carried this to extremes. That of course is impossible on the face of it. I mean that, in the later years when he finally probably admitted to himself that only the style was left, he worked so hard and so laboriously and so self-sacrifieingiy at this, that at times he stood a little bigger, a little taller than it was. He was warm, generous, merry and fond of laughing, without pettiness and jealous only of the integrity which he believed to be absolutely necessary in anyone who approached his craft; he was ready to be generous to anyone, once he was convinced that that one approached his craft with his own humility and respect for it. During those New Orleans days and weeks, I gradually became aware that here was a man who would be in seclusion all forenoon — working. Then in the afternoon he would appear and we would walk about the city, talking. Then in the evening we would meet again, with a bottle now, and now he would really talk; the world in minuscule would be there in whatever shadowy courtyard where glass and bottle clinked and the palms hissed like dry sand in whatever moving air. Then tomorrow forenoon and he would be secluded again — working; whereupon I said to myself, “If this is what it takes to be a novelist, then that’s the life for me.”
On My Obsession with Sherwood Anderson by Bruce Falconer
Their betrayals, hurtful though they were to Anderson, speak to something not uncommon in how people relate to him and his work. Literary critic Irving Howe, in his 1951 biography of Anderson, writes: “When I read Winesburg, Ohio in my adolescence, I felt that a new world had been opened to me, new possibilities of experience, new dimensions of emotion. Not many years later I found myself rejecting Anderson’s work: I was impatient with his vagueness, superior to his uncertainty. Yet he still meant more to me than other writers of unquestionably greater achievement.” I might easily have written those words myself. For years, I have idolized Anderson for the austere rhythm of his prose, his desperate quest for self-knowledge, his empathy and kindheartedness. But he was also vain, immature, sentimental, even pathetic, and despite his best efforts, a stranger to himself. Even so, my affection for him remains. As Anderson wrote in a letter to Van Wyck Brooks, a prominent literary critic who had recently savaged the work of his childhood hero, Mark Twain, “Surely the thing has to be undertaken as a labor of love and love should stomach imperfections.”
Anderson himself possessed an unusually sharp critical eye and plainly realized when his own work, all too often, fell short. Still, he pressed on, driven by an almost religious fervor with regard to the redemptive power of creativity. “The object of art is not to make salable pictures,” he wrote in a 1927 letter to one of his sons, a novice painter. “It is to save yourself.” Depressive by nature, he suffered two nervous breakdowns, both of which sent him reeling aimlessly about the countryside in a kind of fugue state. More than once he seriously contemplated suicide. Known primarily for his short stories, he also produced a number of second-rate novels, both early and late in his career, which most critics judged to be as much a labor to read as they had been for him to write. Still, at least Anderson was laboring on Anderson’s own terms; he no longer felt the pangs of self-loathing that had assaulted his conscience during his time as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. There he had earned a meager living while honing his abilities as a wordsmith. For a man of limited education, the experience could only have improved his prospects. But as the years elapsed without his being able to separate himself from what he sneeringly called the “universal whoredom” of advertising, Anderson grew despondent over the soullessness of the job. (Even after publishing Winesburg, he remained, for a time, unable to earn an independent living.) He came to view himself as a sellout, a slave to the same voracious capitalism that he believed was devouring the best aspects of American life.
The open-hearted Sherwood Anderson (Richard Goodman's Newsletter)
Beyond that, though, Anderson’s book is true. You can experience this dramatically in one of the stories, “Adventure.” The story is about a lonely woman in this small town whose hopes are dashed. A woman whose story, save for Anderson, would be swallowed by much bigger stories that vie, always, for our attention. These are the intimate, intense tragedies in life that everyone knows about and many of us have experienced. Anderson casts his eye on them knowingly and with concern.
I do not see exactly what sparked my interest in Anderson, but I see plenty enough similar to justify these quotes - to myself, anyway. Faulkner would have always been enough for me. For me, he is the great modern American writer, so his saying Sherwood Anderson was a giant is a striking comment.
Considering the influence of Sherwood Anderson on Ernest Hemingway, it seems time to go back to Anthony Burgess' Ninety-Nine Novels: Two Novels by Ernest Hemingway. The two novels are For Whom The Bells Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. When I read the first in 1978, I was as impressed by the novel as I was by the movie (although, I seemed to have been confused then by the word cojones); re-reading the novel while in prison, I was was shocked by its ramshackle shape and being so un-Hemingwayesque in its style. The Old Man and the Sea, I read around 1973 (thank you Scholastic Books!). I think it holds up the better of the two. Its length is far shorter than For Whom The Bells Tolls, shorter than any of the other novels, and far longer than any short short of his. I would call it a novella. What seems to me, it is this short novel that sticks in our cultural mind as the Hemingway novel. I think the podcast does a good job of positioning these novels; it may work against my own dire opinion of For Whom The Bells Tolls.
I came to love Charles Portis, there are other posts on him contained on this blog (please search them out), and I am not sure if I have not already noted The American Anthropology of Charles Portis (Slate). Considering what is in the Sherwood Anderson quotations, I am going ahead and quote from the essay - and hope you have the sense to find and read Portis.
The entertainment value of his work can trick the unwary into thinking it’s not about much. Unfortunately, Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos actually are, in a phrase that would have probably pissed him off, “novels of ideas.” Or one idea, anyway: In these five novels, Portis wrote America.
His plots—a fourteen-year-old girl avenging her father’s death, an obscure power struggle between sectarian cultists, an aspiring teacher driving to Honduras to recapture his wayward wife after she fled his math lessons and “weekly embraces”—are all about America’s obsessions, weaknesses, and incurable fixations. His grifters and drifters show us who we are: gullible, suspicious, and highly susceptible to advertising. And his cast of charlatans have mastered the American art of self-invention, which the American reader almost reflexively admires. The books are screwball, but not trivial. It’s the interest in the carnies who make the world go round that makes his work ring true.
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His stories, all of them picaresque, had the appearance of plainness of craft—well-crafted things tend to appear plain because they don’t need ornamentation. He got more mileage out of “throw these two guys in a car” than Jonathan Franzen got out of the entire known world. There’s a deceptively simple sturdiness to them that conjures the “are you sure Hank done it this way?” posture of outlaw country, until you realize Portis was more of a Roger Miller fan and Roger Miller had a song called “My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died.” Portis’ novels, like Miller’s songs, start with three chords and the truth and unfurl into chaos. The plainness makes you not expect the madness.
All of Portis’ people and places are specific. He had his beat, his areas of interest, and he stayed there, never courting fame or breakout success. He stayed in Arkansas, a place he believed you couldn’t ever quite get out of, and lived his life. But it’s in specificity where we can find and express the universal. Portis’ novels about losers from Arkansas have aged so well because he understood something about America: We’re a profoundly individualistic country, and that makes us a country of con artists, cultists, scammers, and hustlers sitting around thinking hard about cartoons. Once you learn that, you’ll never get fooled
One more from the Anthony Burgess list: Ian Fleming and Goldfinger. Hey, you might as well have some fun with your reading. I read all the Bond books, but one, when I was a teenager. Re-reading Moonraker 50 years later, I was struck by how stodgy was the prose and how much a bureaucrat meeting freakish villains was James. Bond.
Why read Edgar Allan Poe? Watch this one:
I leave you with Salman Rushdie's favorite books:
The Thousand and One Nights
Joyce: Ulysses
Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Dickens: Great Expectations
Borges: Ficciones
Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Grass: The Tin Drum
Calvino: Our Ancestors
Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
sch 10/10
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