A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Americans have a Manichean idea of how writers as supposed to be: Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly, Americans of my age older have this idea.
Hemingway: drinking hard, hunting hard, fishing hard, dropping in on wars and bullfights; a lean, masculine prose.
Fitzgerald: drinking hard, living in the city in a high style, sensitive instead of macho, a more lush prose.
The Hemingway writers, as I think them: Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy.
The Fitzgerald writers: Jack Kerouac, Richard Ford, Paul Auster
Yes, most have drank themselves to death, thankfully.
But there was a third great writer of the Twenties and Thirties who provides a third way of being a writer.
Like Fitzgerald, he graduated an Ivy League school.
Like Hemingway, he was an ambulance driver in World War One.
Unlike either, he had a variable style and was concerned with ideas and big strokes.
He managed to outlive both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The foregoing came to me today after reading John Dos Passos Coggin's The World at the End of a Line in The American Scholar, particularly the following:
Dos Passos loved and extolled the sea every bit as much as his friend Hemingway. From 1928 to 1935, before their friendship frayed under the strain of the Spanish civil war, the two men often fished the waters near Key West together, catching tarpon, sailfish, marlin, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and tuna. The tropics were also the doctor’s prescription for Dos Passos’s recurring bouts of rheumatic fever. They usually brought along a couple of bottles of champagne, but by custom these remained untouched until the first fish was caught. Everyone on Hemingway’s boat received a nickname: “Dos” or “Muttonfish” for Dos Passos, “Hem” or the “Old Master” for Hemingway, “Old Bread” for the boat’s engineer, and “Saca Ham” for the cook. Conversation on these expeditions remained light. “It was a delight to be able to chatter amiably on all sorts of topics without tripping over that damn Party line,” wrote Dos Passos in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times. Hemingway was as competitive at fishing as he was with everything, but nobody got too sore. “Hem was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right,” Dos Passos wrote. Hemingway once invited Arnold Gingrich, the editor and cofounder of Esquire, to go fishing with the gang. “The man was in a trance,” Dos Passos remembered. “It was a world he’d never dreamed of. He was mosquito bitten, half seasick, scorched with sunburn, astonished, half scared, half pleased. It was as much fun to see Ernest play an editor as to see him play a marlin.”
Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” Likewise when it came to fishing, Hemingway and Dos Passos had different motives. Dos Passos fished “for the pot”—to catch lunch or dinner. For that reason, he disliked fishing for tarpon, which figured among Hemingway’s favorite quarry, no matter the theatrics involved in fighting them. “I hated to see the great silver monsters lying in the dust on the wharf,” he wrote. “They aren’t fit to eat. About the only use is for mounting. Some people make knicknacks out of the dried scales. Sheer vanity catching tarpon.” Dos Passos looked to the sea as a salve for his spirit. It was in 1924, during a break from writing one of his best novels, Manhattan Transfer, that he discovered Key West. He understood that islands in general—and by extension, the sea—tended to refill his cup of inspiration. He called his happy affliction “islomania.”
I do not always know what to do with myths. I think my natural inclination is to knock the hot air out of them; certainly to give them a jaundiced viewing. Thank you, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dos Passos kicks in the myth of how an American writer should behave and how he should write. More to the point, he offers an alternative for the American novel that created by the myths of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
I will shoot my mouth one more time before closing, saying that Ross Lockridge, Jr.'sRaintree County and Don DeLillo's Underworldstrike me as Dos Passos novels.
I should be reading John Dos Passos instead of reading about him. I am trying to get this blog up to speed and I cannot deny my curiosity which gets me into filling in the blanks of my education.I can report what I have read of Dos Passos impresses me greatly - he is a more supple writer than I thought likely from my reading about Dos Passos.
I think of this as a sign that Dos Passos is bit quite forgotten:
“all right we are two nations”
So wrote John Dos Passos in his 1936 novel The Big Money. For Dos Passos, America between the world wars had become a place defined by sharp divisions, pitting the oppressors against the oppressed.
Inhabiting one nation were the rich and powerful, those in a position, as Dos Passos put it, to “hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons.” In the other nation were ordinary people — immigrants, workers, the downtrodden — struggling to get by, but “beaten by strangers … who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.”
The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency reveals that we are once again (or perhaps still) two nations. But the divide between the haves and the have-nots is no longer adequate to describe the cleavages laid bare by the election of 2016. For Dos Passos, influenced by the Marxism that was then fashionable, class differences were of paramount importance. Today while still relevant, class alone provides an inadequate explanatory framework. Our cleavages are more profound and encompass status and culture, and by extension race, gender and ethnicity.
Dan Leach writes about his own experience embarking onto an anti-novel:
And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.
Okay, that sounds tempting to me - some doubts about doing the measured tone and the well-developed character abide in my mind. Plus, I decided long ago, while still in Fort Dix, that publishing was unlikely, I was too old to actually hone a style and writerly talents, that I might as well throw caution to the wind and write what I want to read.
Again, Mr. Leach, describes something that attracts me because it does describe the world as I experience - with and after my depression - it.
I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.
He also reminds me what I need to do, to get back to, now I am using now to return to my writing:
And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.
I know of only one of the novels in Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They should be read, of course, but I want to add up the parts that make think this idea is sound, and that this is
... isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.... Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering)... which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.... this book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty..... Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue)... This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained
Okay, the Frosty sounds demented as well as distasteful, and what really sticks is the mixtape analogy.
Award-winning author Alan Michael Parker displays his love for playful narrative and breaking all the rules in Bingo Bango Boingo, a collection of flash fiction and stories told through Bingo cards
Flip the page. Choose your game. Is it "Community Garden Bingo"? "High School Reunion Bingo"? "Don't Hate Your Daddy Bingo"? Or are you finally ready for "Change Your Life Bingo"?
Featuring 40 Bingo cards, interspersed with flash fiction and an opportunity to try the Bingo game yourself, this is a wholly original collection. Delightful, unexpected, and tongue in cheek--they're stories, they're Bingo cards, they're wild, you'll like them.
Taking a look now at Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, its thesis is:
All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. But we suggest that plot might better be understood as an emotional strategy: a controlled burn of surprise, contradiction, revelation. And—we might add–especially, connection.
Architecture and plotting makes me think of a criticism/comment about Thomas Hardy's plots being architectural. Hardy would never do what Davison and LaPlante suggest.
First, what do we mean when we say “throw bombs”? We mean inserting any unanticipated event that is completely disconnected (on the surface, anyway) from what came before it.
There are two kinds of bombs: external and internal.
First, external: a surprising (even shocking) event beyond the control of the characters. An earthquake, tornado or some other act of God. Or a stranger or other unidentified character doing something out of the blue that completely disrupts the story.
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Internal bombs are when an unexpected chain of events is put into motion—but instead of being random and uncontrolled, it can be directly (if subtly) caused by your character(s). In other words, due to who they are, they bring it on themselves.
Here you must be careful not to make it either obvious, or—at the other end of the scale—outrageously unbelievable. It can seem out of character (see nonconforming oddities in our first essay in this series) but it should also be attributable to a herethero unknown (unconscious, hidden) aspect of your character.
What both types of bombs have in common: they should leave you, the writer, with a problem: no idea what will happen next. If you turn your back on cliched or familiar reactions, this can be difficult. If traditional plotting devices are off bounds, you must consider how the bomb changes the characters, the theme, and the situation of the story in surprising yet convincing ways. (Thanks, EM Forster for that nugget of wisdom.).
So, why cannot bombs be thrown in an anarchic way?
Davison and LaPlante write about using a character's emotions to drive a story:
The other plotting strategy we’d like to explore is when a story is driven, not by events, but by the emotional movement of a character. In our forthcoming book from W.W Norton, The Lab: Experiments Writing Across Genre, we use the example of Lydia Peelle’s story, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.”
You can chart the emotional progression of the story’s first-person protagonist as she navigates the loneliness and heartbreak of a divorce. But this is no cliched break-up story. Instead, you can see how the narrator goes through alternating moments of connection and disconnection as she struggles to heal emotionally. The tension between these coming-togethers and alienations from self and others is palpable, although nothing of real significance happens. And you’re often surprised by the things that connect versus the things that emotionally separate this narrator from other people, and the world.
I can imagine doing this with fragments - the see-sawing of emotions, the triggers for those emotions, seem to be very conducive to fragmentary telling. Arias comes to mind.
Then are ideas that Milan Kundera put into his Art of the Novel - that the novel is expansive enough to include an essay, a short story. What I got all those years ago from Kundera was the limit was our imagination and the story needing told.
How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.
In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”
John Dos Passos was once mentioned in the same sentences as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just before I was arrested I started reading his USA Trilogy. I was starting to again get interested in books and writing. My copy disappeared after my arrest and I was never able to get a copy in prison through the interlibrary loan program. When the college courses began and there was a creative writing class offered one of the teachers was able to get me some excerpts. I remain perplexed by the book.
I found Dos Passos on The Paris Review site after my release from prison. The following bits hit home regarding my own writing but may be they will interest you, too.
INTERVIEWER
Have you become the social historian at the expense of the artist?
DOS PASSOS
There’s just no way that I can tell. I have to do what I’m interested in at the time, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily inartistic about being the historian. I have great admiration for good history. All of my work has some certain historical connotation. Take Three Soldiers. I was trying to record something that was going on. I always felt that it might not be any good as a novel, but that it would at least be useful to add to the record. I had that idea when I began writing—with One Man’s Initiation—and I’ve had it right along.
I started this back in August but I must admit most of the actual reading was on October 16, 2021. Just me being confessional.
I seem to recall the Studs Lonigan mini-series but do not recall watching it. Yet from there I learned the name of Studs Lonigan. Somewhere I connected Lonigan with James T. Farrell. While in prison, having decided to fill in the holes of my education in literature, I decided to read the Studs Lonigan trilogy. I accomplished this thanks to the inter-library program.
I wrote notes of my reading and will hope to have them online here in the future. Let say I was impressed with Farrell more than I was with Lonigan. This might be a case of an unappealing protagonist. He is neither Hemingway or Fitzgerald but neither is he Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. I suggest reading a trilogy with the leading character who is a jerk says something about the quality of an author's writing.
Secondly, Farrell is a Chicago writer. Enough of one to be in the Chicago Hall of Fame. This makes him a Midwestern writer, which makes him of interest to me.
Third, I have been John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy for the past month. Farrell was a Leftist; a real one, not what our modern day Republicans call a leftist. Dos Passos also writes about such Leftists.
Farrell wrote and published fiction steadily during these years, arguing that there is an interdependency between the advancement of culture and the struggle for human liberation, although Farrell's fiction differed from that of John Dos Passos, who wrote explicitly political novels. Some of Farrell's work, such as his antifascist novelette Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939), dramatized important political issues, but his Studs Lonigan trilogy demonstrated that he was primarily a novelist of human character. Farrell was acutely sensitive to the psychological costs of living in a class society, and his conceptions of individual consciousness and social destiny were infused with a materialist outlook. This is most evident not only in the Studs Lonigan trilogy, but also in Farrell's second series, the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953). Although the pentalogy centers around the life of Danny O'Neill, Farrell preferred that the five books be called the "O'Neill-O'Flaherty series" because the main characters are derived from both families. Both the Studs Lonigan trilogy and also the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series, conceived about the same time and thematically interconnected, provide an expose of the false consciousness created by the institutions of capitalist society. A third series, the Bernard Carr trilogy�consisting of Bernard Claer (1946), The Road Between (1949), and Yet Other Waters (1952) -- evolved somewhat later but was still linked to the revolutionary Marxist period in Farrell's literary development.
And what I have learned is that Farrell was a good enough writer that he should not be so neglected nowadays. Charles Fanning titled his article for Bridgewater Review Rediscovering James T. Farrell (wherein he makes a good case for such a rediscovery). The Modern Novel makes comments on the three novels of the Lonigan Trilogy (and only those novels); the following comes from the analysis of the trilogy's last novel, Judgment Day:
But it is Chicago that is almost as interesting as Studs. The change in the neighbourhoods, with immigration, is a key theme and one which drives the racism. Portraits of the unemployed during the Depression, marches, bank collapses and the anti-Hoover feeling are all vividly portrayed. And, with two heroes, you definitely feel that you are getting your money’s worth in what is an underappreciated work of American literature.
By his own testimony, Branch, who's also a Mark Twain specialist, is almost alone among scholars and critics in his belief that Farrell deserves resurrecting. "I've thought for some time that he was overdue, but nothing's happened. That's why I was glad I could get this little book published, hoping it would help.
"But it seems to me that these revivals come very, very late for writers," Branch added. "Take the case of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Right now, scholars are finding more and more neglected writers. Eventually, there'll come a time when Jim Farrell gets his proper due."
A big reason Farrell hasn't gotten it already, Branch said, is that "he's been dumped on by so many schools of critics: Marxists, Catholics, formalist academics who prefer Henry James' writing." The neglect is such that the only Farrell book in print, among the more than 50 he published, is the Lonigan trilogy, available in a "Prairie State" edition from the University of Illinois Press.
According to Branch, Farrell has been mistakenly devalued as a mechanical photorealist, a compulsive overwriter whose novels, composed at top speed in a torrential, reportorial prose, are socio-anthropological casebooks rather than imaginative works of psychological literature. "One critic compared him to a war correspondent, who went out into the front-line trenches with a tape-recorder, which is ridiculous. There's a great deal of invention in his writing."
In the Lonigan trilogy, Farrell's seemingly turgid, longwinded style, Branch asserted, was "a very deliberate and meticulous attempt to get a language that would convey Studs' consciousness. Farrell could write, and did write, in many other styles, but this particular objective one was extremely well suited to what he was trying to achieve, and it's one of the glories of the trilogy."
Writers frequently suffer from the vagaries of fashion and it's not unusual for a novelist to be forgotten within a few years of his death. In James T. Farrell's case it would seem that the collapse of his reputation has been almost complete, and it's probably only in a few universities, mostly in the United States, that his name now evokes any interest. And yet, at one time, his novels and short stories were easily available in both hardback and paperback editions and he was often mentioned alongside Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and other leading American authors. That Farrell’s standing has declined so much is curious and invites at least a brief examination of his work.
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If the kind of political fiction I’ve referred to does have its limitations then it may be that Farrell's reputation will have to rest on the novels and stories which deal with Studs Lonigan, Danny O'Neill, and the Irish-American world of Chicago in the first thirty or so years of this century. His rites of passage explorations move around this landscape, recording everything in vivid detail. And, contrary to many assumptions, it's not necessarily the slum neighbourhoods which are described. When he later wrote about how he had conceived Studs Lonigan, Farrell was careful to point out that he had deliberately set the book in a relatively-affluent area where people had steady jobs and owned their own houses, so that he could avoid a kind of vulgar economic determinism which would make Stud's downfall easily explainable. He was enough of a Marxist to suggest that the onset of the Depression hastened his decline by wiping out his savings and destroying his job, but he said that personal failings had started the slide as Studs drank, gambled, ran with gangs, and generally gave himself up to the life of the streets. What Farrell was getting at was the way in which social conformity - the pressure to go with the crowd, agree with the group, and subjugate the sensitive side of one's personality in favour of a rough macho image - could destroy an individual. When he wrote his Danny O'Neill novels, which roughly parallel Studs Lonigan in their time-sequence, his central character found a way out of the restrictive cultural environment, just as Farrell himself had done. The world he described may be a specific one, and its surface details consequently dated, but the situations evoked are still very real today.
Might politics explain Farrell's fall from literary grace? It was for Nelson Algren and for John Dos Passos.
Another explanation could be his interest in working people. My friend K complains about MFA writers and his complaint may be relevant here. How many of our current writers know the working class? Of those those who do find have such knowledge, what interest do they have in writing about working people? .
And let me not let the readers off the hook. Publishers will not buy what they cannot sell and what do the readers of Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen care about the lives of those poorer, working jobs for the minimum wage? I have answered this for my own writing in the negative. I suspect this divide might also have expression in our current American political divide.
If we read writers like Farrell and Algren and Dos Passos out of the American canon, we distort the meaning of American literature. We may even distort the meaning of America.
THE RETURN OF STUDS LONIGAN by Bette Howland is a reappraisal of Studs Lonigan and Farrell:
It’s no secret that Farrell came to resent the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Over the course of his long and amazingly productive career, all his other work would be measured against it. The Danny O’Neill series, Bernard Clare ; the novels of the Universe of Time; volumes of short stories, journalism, literary criticism; his steady and persistent portrayal of “the American way of life” through the lives he knew so well. He became a writer taken for granted; he wrote “too much.” (Those thick glasses”crystal balls in his old age”weren’t props; he was driven in part by fear of going blind.) His own favorite novel was his last, the deeply personal Invisible Swords ; but by then not many were paying attention. In the final months of his life, Farrell was signing copies of a new edition of the trilogy for the publisher: another autograph, another dollar. He needed the money. At the same time a television miniseries was portraying Studs, yet again, as the movie tough guy he so longed to be. Fifty-some books on the shelves, and Farrell remained the author of Studs Lonigan.
Farrell was not a lesser Dreiser. He never considered himself, as so many critics have, a disciple, and except in his own gloomier moods didn’t agree with Dreiser’s ideas. (Luckily, Dreiser didn’t always agree with his own ideas himself.) Farrell never lost his sense of having to put up a fight, to define himself against . This came with being a writer “of plebeian origin”:
He sees things from the outside, not the inside . . . .His subject is his own world around him . . . .The feelings of alienation he meets sometimes make him hardened, stubborn and resistant. He spends his youth in struggling to get what a son of Groton acquires as if by natural right.
A son of Groton might have his own ups and downs, but the issue here is legitimation. “Dreiser had to plead his case as a writer,” Farrell wrote. “Just as he had to discover for himself, so his sympathetic readers similarly had to discover.” Dreiser gave Farrell permission”this is what one writer can do for another. It was a spiritual debt, and Farrell passed it on.
You can make your own decision, Google Books has Studs Lonigan online here.
Although Fitzgerald’s Follies from Liberties is mostly hidden by a paywall, this was available and has some interesting points.
...Fitzgerald overdid something to which Erasmus’ Folly admits — that she had been raised up and nourished by Bacchus. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism constrained his literary output and led to his premature death at the age of forty-five. The adult Fitzgerald could not take care of himself. We do not associate Fitzgerald with anything like wisdom literature. He never wore a beard, that “ensign of wisdom,” according to Erasmus’ Folly. He could not be confused with Tolstoy, who did have a beard and who broached the biggest and the best questions, boldly titling a novel War and Peace. (Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise, in which this side of paradise — a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke — is more or less a brilliant undergraduate career at Princeton University.) Fitzgerald did not even write novels of ideas. He was no Thomas Mann, no communicant with the philosophical heavyweights, no worldly interpreter of high politics. Until his death, Fitzgerald agonized about not being sufficiently educated or well read. He never graduated from Princeton, and it bothered him. In The Great Gatsby, the book that will always define him, Fitzgerald expends marvelous prose on a small and insignificant man. It is a perfect novella to depict the dreams, the extravagance, the alleged greatness of a bootlegger whose golden girl got away. Gatsby lacks any guiding wisdom. He lacks gravitas. The incognito protagonist, he lacks a real profile even in his eponymous novel. He is an empty vessel of social climbing and romantic longing who embraces the folly-filled tawdriness of his cultural moment. Gatsby is the boy who never outgrew high school, not to mention college (which he falsely claims to have attended). His shallowness and frivolity would have made him a bit player in War and Peace, a petty officer. Or Tolstoy would have chosen to transform Jay Gatsby, to reform him, leading him through a moral awakening. Tolstoy would not have left Gatsby’s folly intact, as Fitzgerald is very willing to do. According to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and later his literary executor, Edna St. Vincent Millay compared Fitzgerald to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.” A similar image occurred to John Dos Passos: “when he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to be full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as diamond.” Fitzgerald fretted about wasting his diamond-like literary talent on the literature of immaturity, or he was sensitive to the accusation of doing this. In 1934, in an unpublished preface to Gatsby, he wrote of being “kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” Without cultivating an aura of wisdom, however, the beardless Fitzgerald did write wisdom literature. He wrote it not by denigrating folly, not by dismissing it, and not by treating folly as peripheral to wisdom....
The counselor for my group sessions talked about how obvious and, therefore boring, were the themes of The Great Gatsby. Hard to disagree when I think Fitzgerald is a much better writer of short stories. (You can search this site for my other notes on Fitzgerald.) Impossible, however, to deny the quality of Fitzgerald's prose.
If there is any writer of ideas from amongst Fitzgerald's contemporaries, it has to be John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. I do not think either of them write as finely as Fitzgerald. Faulkner is a treasure trove of style without ever slipping into the noodling delicacies of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos has not the baroque sentences of Faulkner, nor is his prose stylish for the sake of style.
In his defense, I would say Gatsby persists by virtue of his vacuity. Being American, we are a country prone to vacuity. Perhaps the allure of reinvention - certainly its myth - gives us the ability to escape the wisdom possible from self-reflection.
I recall reading somewhere that Fitzgerald was a favorite of The Beats, like Jack Kerouac. This makes sense if Fitzgerald is the scribe of immaturity.
I also had to remember that it was Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Justification for his own way of life?
I suppose, like John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Raintree Countywas too long, too complicated to teach in the schools.There is also a Dos Passos connection with how Lockridge uses imaginary news reports as a counter-voice to his narrator. Also like Dos Passos, I cannot imagine anyone following in Lockridge's footsteps. The Great American Novel died as a genre, or so I believe. Gore Vidal covered some of the same territory in Lincolnand in 1876, but to my recollection, those novels feel cramped in comparison to Raintree County. For a historical novel, the only historical characters given speaking parts are Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant - and they only appear in cameos.
On the other hand, I think there might a Lockridge influence in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I cannot point to anything specific. Tonally, they are quite different.
Lockridge's achievement does not deserve to be forgotten.
I read Keeping Readers at Arm’s Length with Distanced POV from Live Write Thrive while I was still working my way through John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. He made use of film techniques. The article mentions one that I think was used by Dos Passos:
Using the camera shot POV is a great technique novelists can borrow from filmmakers. For some writers, the idea of showing a scene completely devoid of emotion, reaction, internalizing, and opining may seem counterintuitive—or downright counterproductive. Isn’t the whole point to tell a story up close and personal?
Sure. But there may be times when you want to see action happening without coloring it with any subjective tint. When you want a feeling of emotional distance.
The Trilogy uses three points if view of which two qualify as objective.
The blog offers up a tip on how to implement the pov:
"Remember, the objective of every Scene is to lead to the high moment at the end, and it will take a number of shots to get there, and some shots often will follow after that high moment as well. Filmmakers will sometimes "storyboard," which means they actually sketch out frames of images implying which shot will be used when, how, and focusing on what. If you're good at drawing or can even manage a few stick figures, you could try laying out your scenes on big pieces of poster board. But you can also jot down camera shots in a list, playing around with them until you have a sequence that will meet your needs."
I suggest dipping into Dos Passos for how pov may well involve the tone and texture of one's prose.
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is concerned with every citizen’s public right to use their reason: everyone in a civilised society, Kant argues, should have the freedom to question the status quo and take part in a debate about how society should be governed and maintained. But such public rights and freedoms need to be balanced by the citizen’s private or civic responsibility to obey the law, and observe the status quo, when required to.
In other words, even while we discuss and philosophise about how to improve society, we have to live in the one we currently have, and civilisation would break down if people chose, for instance, to stop following laws they considered unjust or refused to pay their taxes because they disagreed with the levels of taxation.
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is fundamentally a clarion-call to people about the need to ‘dare to be wise’. What is required is not merely intellect but also a willingness to engage one’s reason and exercise that reason upon the everyday things that govern our lives: political systems, financial structures, education, trade, and much else. Enlightenment is mankind’s coming-to-maturity, a willingness to think for oneself and emerge from an immature state where we hand over the power and responsibility to authority figures, whether they’re priests, doctors, teachers, or politicians
Now, I am going to work on submitting my stories.
"Problem Solving" went to Route 7 because nothing else was open now.
Headlines from The Guardian were arrived in my email.
I finished the story. KH now has a copy, poor fellow.
A nap and a trip to McClure's happened earlier today. The rain had stopped, then it started again. Now it is just wet outside.
The search for CC has hit another wall. Fears of relapse. Funny thing is CC and KH and K would all have an agreement about my attraction for crack cocaine. I have felt none such thing, even when I was running with the crackheads. Certainly, I have felt no desire since I have been in Muncie. The thing was having a secret life. Well, those compartments all got collapsed back in 2010. These notes do not, I think, put them back together again. The thrill of a secret life was my motivation before my arrest. No thrill when all is known. That my behavior feels like such utter silliness now also helps.
WXPN played the album Wilko made with Roger Daltrey, and I liked it for all of not having a clue who was Wilko Johnson.
Listen and enjoy:
"Problem Solving" got another review, but a rather nice one:
Thank you
for allowing us to read your submission. While there was a lot that we
loved about your work, we won't be moving forward with it for this
issue. We truly hope you will submit with us again in the future.
When
she learned she could make a living doing this, she never let the
thought go. Later, she would call it her “positive obsession” and would
put it all on the line. Her mother’s youngest sister, who was the first
in the family to go to college, became a nurse. Despite her family’s
warnings, she did exactly what she wanted to do. That same aunt would
tell Butler, “Negroes can’t be writers,” and advise her to get a
sensible job as a teacher or civil servant. She could have stability and
a nice pension, and if she really wanted to, she could write on the
side. “My aunt was too late with it, though,” Butler said. “She had
already taught me the only lesson I was willing to learn from her. I did
as she had done and ignored what she said.”
Butler
would grow up to write and publish a dozen novels and a collection of
short stories. She did not believe in talent as much as hard work. She
never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they
should learn, study, observe, and persist. Persistence was the lesson
she received from her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt. In her
lifetime, she would become the first published Black female
science-fiction writer and be considered one of the forebears of
Afrofuturism. “I may never get the chance to do all the things I want to
do,” a 17-year-old Butler wrote in her journals, now archived at the
Huntington Library in Pasadena. “To write 1 (or more) best sellers, to
initiate a new type of writing, to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer
prizes (in reverse order), and to sit my mother down in her own house
before she is too old and tired to enjoy it.” The world would catch up
to her dreams. In 2020, Parable of the Sower would hit the
best-seller list 27 years after its initial publication and 14 years
after Butler’s death. After years of imitation, Hollywood has put
adaptations of nearly all of her novels into development, beginning with
a Kindred show coming to Hulu in December. She is now experiencing a canonization that had only just begun in the last decade of her life.
###
What the archives show is how much she struggled with hope herself. She was “a pessimist if I’m not careful.” When she was working on a novel, her drafts tended to reveal the crueler sides of human nature. She didn’t like Lauren Olamina at first because she saw the character as a power seeker. Earlier iterations of Parable depicted her as a calculated leader who orders assassinations on her enemies and puts shock collars on those who try to leave Earthseed. But the version of Lauren in the finished book is wise, practical, strong — someone who could grow a community into a movement. If Butler had been writing idealized selves since childhood, Lauren was the young adult she wished she had been, and her rise into myth has come to resemble her character’s. You could understand this as a function of her desire for commercial success: We all need heroes. But another way to see it is that hope is not a given. It was through rewriting that she was able to imagine not only the darkest possible futures, but how to survive within them. Hope and writing were an entwined practice, the work of endless revision.
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas.
Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going
and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas
themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and
doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for
everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have
an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing
science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the
impossible.
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of
my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who
swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent
of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at,
but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great
science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have
written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across
the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in
a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the
possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could
have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?
BRADBURY
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t
been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last
fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the
importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been
neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty
years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction
of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except
in terms of intellectual snobbery.
I say he is still right about the novel of ideas. We may have even more need of it now with the rise of fascism. I will venture this opinion: MFA candidates do not need ideas, only style. My own former profession turns out people who have no education in history or politics or philosophy. Why should the writing schools not turn out writers who know only writing.
I dropped in on HarlanEllisonBooks.com just to see how one of the great short story tellers was faring 2 years after his death. It looks like he is doing fine.
It is 7:38. I need a break from the computer.
I have showered, and started yawning so hard, my body shakes. Thinking it is time to end this post.
This peculiar blending of artfulness and artlessness was saluted by
Sartre as a literary feat in his 1938 article “John Dos Passos and 1919.” Sartre writes of Dos Passos: “he has done everything possible to make his novel a
mere reflection. […] The reason is that his art is not gratuitous; he
wants to prove something. But observe what a curious aim he has. He
wants to show us this world, our own—to show it only, without
explanations or comment” (Sartre, 2003 363). Later in his essay, Sartre
emphasizes that the world Dos Passos presents to the reader is, however,
no mere reflection, but a carefully constructed object: “I know of
none—not even Faulkner’s or Kafka’s—in which the art is greater or
better hidden” (Sartre, 2003 364). Considering the trilogy as a work
where art is “hidden” might seem paradoxical, given the way in which the
author openly displays the structure of his novels, in which the
various modes of narration are typographically separated from each other
and identified by their titles (“Camera Eye,” “Newsreels”…). By
comparing Dos Passos to Kafka and Faulkner, Sartre implicitly
characterizes this hidden art as eminently modernist, thus going against
the conception of modernist novels as artefacts concerned with showing
their art rather than hiding it. The technique of montage, to which
Sartre refers, thus appears as both a way of bringing the novel closer
to a hypothetical “truth” of existence and a device that enables the
writer to reintroduce, through the impersonality of collage, a form of
narrative authority, of “hidden artfulness.”
Two weeks have gone by since my last entry. It seemed longer.
I remain dissatisfied with the VOA halfway house. I write that even though I am out on a 3 hour pass having been promoted to Level 4. Whoopie! I went to CVS to get my refill of Zoloft. I do like the Zoloft as it seems to keep me from getting too agitated. I have been smoking a few cigarettes, all the same. Puffing, not inhaling. They taste bad which is a strange counter-balance to my roiling stomach. I cannot go to the IUPUI library (due to a lack of computer supervision for a villain like me) but I can go to the Center City Mall. If I were the maniac the federal government thinks me, should I be let loose in a mall? I guess since there is nothing to do in the mall [and subsequently, fewer people] the VOA feels safe in letting me go there. Having been there and finding not even an open restaurant, I can understand their feeling of safety. I had to go across the street to the PNC Center to find an open Subway (my first in around 11 years).
I do not mind not going to the library as I purchased through Thrift BooksJohn Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. I am half way through the first novel, The 42nd Parallel. More about that later.
I have not yet decided if I trust my case manager. Allegedly she has a bias against sex offenders. Such malice I have not seen. Instead, I get this when we meet:
when I asked about speaking with my federal probation officer who will need to approve my apartment, she says I need to give her a note 2 weeks before my departure (10/7/21 is when I leave, so my deadline is 9/22); and
I need to remind her over and over of my intentions to settle in Muncie [we had been meeting every two weeks since my arrival].
If I had not asked about the probation officer, I do not think she would have offered the information. Our next meeting is 9/27/2021. If I had waited till then would it have been too for me to get my apartment approved? [Turned she found out there was no need for the PO to approve the apartment.] If so, What would I have done for a place to live? Rather than bias, I prefer thinking her talents do not rise to the occasion.
If not for myself, I would not have a job. If not for my people [and the internet], I would be without any leads on where to live. Where is the aid in translating me from prison life to civilian life?
I offer this observation as my answer: the halfway house concerns itself first with meeting bureaucratic dictates, then with incarceration of its inmates and then with managing its drug addicts and its mental health inmates., and transition into civilian comes up when they have a few spare moments. Ms. Greenup dutifully asks me questions from the checklist on her computer. She has never engaged me in conversation. Sbhe presented goals for me back in May without any input from me - without asking me why or why not I had any goals of my own. Instead, she inserted my obtaining employment by May 28 as an aspirational goal and then did nothing to promote that goal. Frankly, I have not cared overmuch about her role.
Four things being in the VOA has allowed me to do: 1) get a knock off of a London Fog coat; 2) raise money for an apartment (they do feed and shelter me); 2) use of the computer lab to get this blog started; and 4) using their computers to get my play "Masque of the Red Death" in an electronic format. I could have gotten only #2 done in a homeless shelter.
I should probably thank them for the free wi-fi also. I would have gone completely bonkers without anything to read. Instead I have been using my flip phone to fulfill my urges to read. And for music, too - YouTube has been a joy. I have been using my 2 hours of charging my electronic monitoring device for listening to Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri and other writers. Last night I listened to a lecture on D.H. Lawrence and this morning it was John Dos Passos. Don't tell the VOA about all this unsupervised computer use. I would hate to undermine their confidence in what I would do with unfettered computer use. (Right now I am listening to Howling Wolf's Moaning in the Moonlight album.) You, dear reader, may be surprised at the lack of my temptation to indulge in criminal activity. It was never a compulsion and now I feel I am living on borrowed time and have no time to waste on useless ugliness. I have debts to pay I do not have the time for anything distracting me from my obligations. But let's not upset the government and its agents with any contradictions to their party line. They do think they mold reality.
But why should you trust felonious me?
I have seen an eye doctor - I got new glasses that look good on me and reassurances of relative good health for my eyes.
There was a second meeting with my primary care doctor. All is good there - except for my lungs and her wanting a colonoscopy for me.
I am getting along at Jimmy Johns. I will miss those people as much as I will not miss the VOA.
I need to get back to my writing. I hope to raise funds and I will need to pay the rent.
3. Emotional Sincerity, Vulnerability, and Earnestness
4. Moral Clarity (With Nuance)
5. Joy and Wonder
6. Goodheartedness
I have come to see necessity of #3 in my stories, and I have been working on this. I never thought of #5 and #6, but having seen them, I can see their importance. Sound and Fury had Dilsie and Benjy to bring joy, wonder and goodheartedness into the novel.
Why No One Cares About Your Writing (just scrape his politics off of his message):
If you want people to care about your writing - you have to commit to being a literary writer. He says what I wish I knew in 1982 - the writers we admire put thousands of hours into their work. When you understand this amount of time is needed, I hope you are younger than I was!
How good of a writer are you? Some good answers here:
A practical advice site that I found again today while looking for publishers of novellas: Writing Tips Oasis.
I ran across a reference to The struggle to define cinematic writing(Constance Hale, 2020), and the title intrigued me. I doubted whether I had more of an interest after reading:
I've been struggling to find the right term for the nonfiction writing I most admire. Whether written by Joan Didion, David Grann, Susan Orlean, Héctor Tobar, Isabel Wilkerson, or Gene Weingarten, these are articles, essays, and books that combine suspenseful storytelling with literary style. They tackle true stories in a way that makes me feel, when I put them down, that I have learned something about the human experience but also something about writing.
There has no shortage of names for this genre through the years: literary journalism, narrative journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and the literature of fact.
For me, it was interesting without giving me much to think until I came to this.
This all starts with a narrator who acts like an observing camera — we see landscapes, we watch people, we are carried along with the action. (Journalists call one classic technique “a ride-along,” following a subject so closely that the reader feels put into the car; I tried this in a recent profile of a street photographer in Oakland.) It might entail shifting points of view, or deftly changing perspectives between different characters. (Take a look at David Grann’s “Trial by Fire.”) It might be suspenseful as a thriller. (Journalist-historian Adam Hochschild is a master of slow-release structure.) It might mean thinking of film editing when you are devising a structure, creating a tense rhythm by cutting rapidly from one character to another — or in a scene, changing from a bird’s eye view to a close-up. (Watch old Perry Mason TV episodes for inspiration in black and white.)
It left me thinking about John Dos Passos and his USA Trilogy with its movie eye. Here might be a way to improve on Dos Passos.
There is also a reading list that looks good, it starts with John Hershey's Hiroshima.
The meaning you’re going to find in your book is not going to reveal itself at some point in the distant future. That meaning is also not subject to the whims of gatekeepers. It doesn’t really even matter whether your book gets published, though it probably doesn’t feel that way to you right now.
The meaning is already here, if you can stay attuned to it.
Because writing changes us for the better. Because we’re creating meaning out of that void. Because we’re leaving something behind that might make others feel less alone. Because we’re taking pain and turning it into light.
So yes. Sometimes it can feel like you’re dropping a pebble in a grand expanse of sea. It barely makes a ripple. That’s one way of looking at it.
But think about the pebble. Who knows what it’s going to encounter as it plunges into the watery depths?
I think impressive now is what I see as Mr. Lockridge's subsuming of influences. I knew of the James Joyce influence as a teenager. I may have even written Lockridge as an merely an American imitator - although I think as I thought more of him as an American challenger. Having finally read Ulysses, I must abandon any thought of him as an imitator of Joyce except in his use of the dash as a substitute for the quotation mark, of having an interest in history (although Joyce wants free of Irish history and Lockridge does not want American history forgotten), of having a writer as a protagonist, and their erudition. Now with Lockridge, there are more obvious influences because he calls them out: Shakespeare and Walt Whitman and Thomas Carlyle. Raintree County's scope - from the run up to the Civil War to 1892 - makes me think of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Reading the December 27 New York Times Book Review I wonder if Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway [a novel I have not read and I cannot recall what specifically led me to this conclusion.] The character of the Perfesser, a cynical interlocutor, recalls Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain without the theatrical dress. I believe there are two references to Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana- and no book from Indiana could be so far removed from Booth Tarkington as Raintree County. Lockridge provides his own answer to the issue raised by Thomas Wolfe about being able to go home again and adds to that problem the returnee being dead. Yet I cannot, will not, say Raintree County or Ross Lockridge, Jr. imitate any other novel or writer. What their influences they are subsumed into the story.
I suppose like John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Raintree County was too long, too complicated, [too unfashionable politically] for teaching in college courses which might have kept attention on the novel. (And there is a [possible] Dos Passos connection in how Lockridge intersperses his novel with imaginary news reports as a counter-voice to his narrative. I cannot imagine anyone following in his footsteps. After all, The Great American Novel has died out as a genre. Gore Vidal covered some of the same territory in Lincoln and 1876.in a style more mainstream than that of Lockridge. For what appears to be a historical novel only two historical figures - Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are given speaking parts - and then only in what amounts to cameos.
Yet for its obscurity, it is an achievement that ought not be forgotten
Sunday was reading John Dos Passos and fiddling with email and a couple of websites related to writing, listening to music while I read, walking to work and 7 hours there before getting a taxi back here fot more of Dos Passos. Now I'm turning in. Big day tomorrow.
Not for me do the holidays continue. No, the Delaware County Sheriff along with the whole of the Delaware County Government used today as part of their Christmas holiday. Never underestimate a government agency or employee to take a holiday. None of this did I find out until I got to the building. I was supposed to be at work at 9 AM. I would have had an hour in already.
First, I ought to finish up about Sunday. Yesterday was not much but work and sleep. I did finish John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. The novels deserve to be read and I will explain whenever I get a real computer to do my writing. Then I started on Djuna Barnes' Nightwood - a very different kind of writer for all her being a contemporary of Dos Passos.
Today, I walked over to Memorial and picked up a different bus. I called K first - an act of desperation - but she was working. Good thing I had a day pass for the bus - a great value for a buck. Then I got the #6 bus to work. Where it was so bloody slow until five, just before I left. I stayed to help Alex but I had to leave. I got in 34 hours this week. I walked over to Aldi's for groceries and then to Walgreen's for a tube of Ben-Gay before taking the #6 back downtown. The #5 bus got me back to my room. Dinner, working on my income for when I go talk with welfare tomorrow, talked to my sister, doing a little reading, and watched some Doctor Who.
Now I have finished writing this and it is closing in on midnight. Maybe I can finish Barnes tomorrow.
Business, commerce, has not been of interest to writers for a long time, then I ran across the review Fate and fortune in the 21st century(Engelsberg ideas). The review mentions the scarcity of fiction dealing with business. Read the following and decided if Alexander Starritt (who I never heard of before) has found a way of bringing life to an old genre.
Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt, Swift Press, £16.99
In Drayton and Mackenzie, his ambitious third novel, Alexander Starritt has accomplished something few, if any, of his millennial generation have even attempted. He has taken the Bildungsroman, the novel of intellectual formation, the journey from youth to maturity, and given it a new lease of life. He has done so by infusing it with elements of the European and American realist traditions, in which a whole era is held up to the light.
Yet the result is something else entirely: a novel of ideas that tells the story of a firm in gritty detail. What Starritt implies is that the ideas that count now are business ideas. Whatever alchemy may take place in the laboratory of science or humanity, it is only when the power of capital can be harnessed that the mind is able to take wing, to mould the affairs of men and women and lend meaning to their lives.
This focus on the literary potential of commerce was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has become rarer since. It evidently owes much to the author’s unusual career trajectory. Now 40, Starritt began life in the business world, as one of a team behind the policy platform Apolitical. By his early thirties, he was prosperous enough to become a professional writer. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was a latter-day Scoop, mocking the prejudices and pretensions of the tabloid press. Starritt was raised in Scotland but spent much of his youth staying with his German grandparents. This resulted in a second novel, We Germans (2020). This reminiscence of the last days of the Second World War depicted a soldier, based on his grandfather, coming to terms with the grim reality of what he and his comrades had experienced and done. It was a critical success and has been translated into German and other languages.
***
Although James and Roland are by no means physically attracted to each other, their relationship is more like a marriage than a business partnership. At a crucial juncture, when Roland needs to persuade Alan, a canny Scottish engineer, to join their still non-existent enterprise, he finds himself delivering what he realises is a ‘wedding speech’ about his oddbod friend. ‘On his gravestone it would say “He actually did it.” As in, loads of people say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?” But his thing is that he really does it.’
A portrait of the human cost of entrepreneurship – its highs and lows, its triumphs and tragedies — emerges that is convincing enough to make us care about these two privileged and somewhat spoilt man-children. Both are indulged by devoted parents who let their sons live at home indefinitely but can, when required, provide ‘a few hundred thousand’ for a flat. Yet neither is driven by money: Roland is careless about it and James doesn’t know what to do with it.
James in particular is an example of the ‘worldly asceticism’ that Max Weber saw as the characteristic source of the Protestant work ethic. Roland draws inspiration, rather, from what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’, without which the rational calculus of capitalism doesn’t add up. Between them, they possess a complementary combination of brainpower and people skills that can withstand the fluctuations of fashion, fate and fortune.
***
When I said that this was a novel of ideas, I didn’t mean the occasional glimpses of the author’s political beliefs — which one suspects are pretty much those of the protagonists. This is the world according to the Weekend section of the Financial Times. (Sure enough, Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year — a rare distinction for a work of fiction.) Rather, what gives the novel its intellectual heft is the attempt to delve into what makes a young person acquire ambition. This is not straightforward at all: for the first half of the novel, Roland is constantly looking for an escape from the iron cage in which James has captured him. It is only by following the example of others that we learn to spread our wings. Yet human beings are motivated by the desire for fame far more than fortune. And it is only by the pursuit of ideas, often obscure ones, that the whole rich tapestry of human commerce and endeavour is conjured into existence.
When I think of the business novel, I think of Theodore Dreiser. (Which reminds me, I have his The Bulwark lying around here unread.) Dreiser is not in good repute. (I keep worrying that my prose is as flat as his.) He had his novel of ideas, too. Perhaps this is one reason why novelists turned away from putting the businessman under the literary microscope. Then, too, there is Babbitt, where Sinclair Lewis turns the businessman into an uncool sap. Third, there was ever so much examining American capitalism through a socialist lens; thinking of John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy here. Finally, how many writers know of the business life, especially in these days of the MFA writer?
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit comes to mind, although I know only of the movie, not the novel. And it has been long decades since I saw last saw the movie. Reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel, the plot brings to mind Lewis more than Dreiser; Dos Passos seems to have the building.
I am still trying to find the way to tell the overarching story for my "The Dead and The Dying" stories. It was a found theme, not an intentional one: the effects of deindustrialization in an Indiana factory town. The industry was initially a local creation held by a family, then they sold out to a New York corporation; the New York corporation shuts the company down eight years after its purchase, sending the town into shock. I did not intend that when I started, but it is pretty much what happened to my hometown of Anderson. General Motors had colonized the city and then abandoned it. The locals are left trying to get by, or trying to be heroes and restore the town to what it was. The heroism doesn't work because capital has deserted them. What may succeed - and I leave success contingent - is a radical creative who never intended to give life to the city's economy, combining with others. It is not the heroic individual capitalist but a group - a democratic movement - has promises life. I am still trying to figure out how to sharpen the stories. Both the collection and a novella consolidating the stories are making the rounds. The novella focuses more on one particular character as a thread through the stories. I keep thinking of revisions to the collection, but not of the novella. Even while writing this, visions pop up in my head.
Working through something else, I ran across a sight I spent time on a few years ago, but have not been visiting of late: The Modern Novel. The proprietor has a page of lists, My Book Lists. I am looking at Neglected Writers and The Great American Novel. I am just saying here may be something to spark you.
10/26
Continuing the theme of literary fame's slipperiness and promoting writers you might not have heard of:
This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide.
***
Today’s reader of Kay Cicellis will find in her voice another missing piece of the female literary puzzle, a woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off of the conventions that adhere both to the living and to the representation of them. She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes.
I can say now that I have read Rachel Cusk; even if not any of her novels.
Also from The Paris Review is The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver by Amanda Fortini taught me that Jack Kerouac had a daughter who wrote two novels, and they are nothing like his. It may also finally brought out what has left a little towards On The Road, that it hid behind lyrical prose the hardscarabble lives of Americans.
As an author of both stories and novels, how is your approach to those two forms similar and different?
Short story is the one true form, in my opinion. You can get a short story a lot closer to perfect than a novel. A novel is going to be flawed, and even as I know this, it sort of drives me crazy. With short story writing, if things are going well and an idea has legs, I draft a story in four or five extended sittings. Just really focused and fast. I try to draft them as clean as possible as I go. Then I’ll revise and edit over a few weeks. I don’t like to over-revise the short fiction. I try not to kill what is loose about the form, or gestural, with lengthy explanation or backstory.
With novel writing, on the other hand, I revise endlessly. Some sections take me five to eight drafts. Some I never get exactly right. In the drafting phase, I work through a novel in chronological order and write 500 words a day. That’s a number I can hit, and often exceed, even if I have work or life obligations on a certain day.
In both cases, I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope. I call this state being “lower than a worm.” A feeling that nothing will ever come of what I’m working on is crucial. A feeling of my smallness in relation to the world. I gotta be below the dirt. I am nothing and nobody. That frees me up. Who cares what a worm thinks, you know?
That worm idea works for me. I have no idea what I am doing - editors and friends are too kind to say so, but it's the truth. I do think I am finally getting a grip in the short story - 50 years since I wrote my first one. I not a slow learner - I am a very slow learner.
Growing up with having no idea how real writers worked and thought, I try to collect sites where writers do talk about their work. Granta Podcasts is such a resource.
I did not know the writer before the video. She is a delightful conversationalist, and one that is also inspirational. Wannabe or published writers would do well to spend time here.
sch 11/14
I read one of Walter Benjamin's books while in prison, and I understand his importance to Western intellectuals, but I have to admit the writing rules in the following video seem commonplace other than in their expression:
