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.
The hallmark of Portis’s work is farce delivered with a straight face in
successions of tightly choreographed set pieces, splitting the
difference between the picaresque and the grotesque. He draws on a
tradition established by Melville in Moby-Dick, and sustained across the
generations by writers as varied as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John
Kennedy Toole, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Mary Robison, Paul Beatty,
Percival Everett and Nell Zink.
“Anything I set out to do
degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” Portis told Newsweek in 1985. “I
can’t seem to control that.” But one should not mistake lightness for
slightness. Portis is a comedian of the highest order, but he is
finally—as all comedians must be—a moral philosopher, because comedy,
like prophecy, is always grounded in a critique of the world as it is
based on a vision of the world as it ought to be. I’m reminded of a
remark of Flannery O’Connor’s, made in a brief preface to the second
edition of Wise Blood, published in 1962, two years before the end of
her life and four years before Portis’s debut. “All comic novels that
are any good must be about matters of life and death,” O’Connor wrote. A
few lines down, she poses a question: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in
what he is not able to do?” For O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, the answer is
yes: his inability to refuse Christ is the bedrock of his integrity and
the path to his salvation, brutal as it is when it arrives. For Portis’s
schemers, dreamers, dropouts, road-trippers, scammers and pilgrims, the
answer varies based on who is driving the given story and what it is
they’re after. But Portis, unlike O’Connor, has a baseline level of
respect for anyone stubborn enough to sustain whatever quest they may
happen to be on, separate from the question of whether said quest is
worth completing or if it ought to have been undertaken in the first
place.
Such pioneer spirit is a distinctly American quality, and
nobody embodied it more fully while also mocking it more ruthlessly than
Portis in his five peerless novels. A new Library of America Collected
Works gathers them together in one volume, supplemented by a judicious
selection of “Stories & Other Writings”—all told 1,100 pages of
handsomely bound bible-paper well worth your $45 and the mild eye
strain. What comes into focus as you make your way through is a
worldview that favors that old Emersonian notion of self-reliance, as
well as the observation made by the man in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
that “good fences make good neighbors.” These are loquacious,
peripatetic novels written by a guy who thought that people ought to
stay home and keep to themselves. Exactly none of his characters are
able to do this, and it is from their extravagant failures of silence
and stillness that Portis’s comedy derive.
Folks, you can find the collected works here. Do yourself a favor and get it. Learn what is great about America.
Yet
while these later novels were often his most comically unusual and
inventive, they failed to sell very well, and, though widely reviewed,
they often suffered unfavorable comparisons to the earlier work. None
achieved the cinematic clarity of True Grit; they don’t
translate into other media, and can’t be explained in terms of familiar
commercial genres (such as science fiction, or “the Western,” or even
“serious literature”). Like their central characters, they remain
uniquely, supremely, and self-indulgently themselves. As a result,
Portis’s life’s work has never been properly appreciated, despite a
legion of prominent admirers, from Ed Park and Donna Tartt to Wells
Tower. (Jonathan Lethem has called Portis “everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.”) For while True Grit
was an almost perfect combination of imaginative storytelling and
commercial success, it set the stage for one of the most remarkable
disappearances-in-plain sight of contemporary literature.
###
Like Mark Twain, William Saroyan, or even Damon Runyon, Portis was
a poet of American vernacular; the oddly rhythmic ways his characters
spoke reflected more than the regions that formed them—they marked the
deep twists and contradictions of their inner nature. But despite
frequent comparisons to Huckleberry Finn, Portis’s Mattie and the
eponymous Norwood are not the sort who, on a whim, will “light out for
the territory ahead of the rest,” but rather are always looking to
return home and settle down to their normally humdrum, routine lives.
(There is more of L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy Gale about them than Huck
Finn.) If anything, Mattie only wants to bring the wild West back to
Arkansas in the embodiment of Cogburn’s casket, which, at True Grit’s conclusion, she buries in the family plot and memorializes with a $65 tombstone.
If that doesn't whet your whistle, then more the pity for you.
In particular, the notes and drafts and changes for True Grit
are a rich vein for exploration. Early pages have the book’s indelible
characters, whom I have trouble imagining under any other names, as
Carrie White (for Mattie Ross), Evans (for LaBoeuf), and James Chaney
(instead of Tom, which Portis changed after remembering that James
Chaney was the Black civil rights activist murdered in Mississippi in
1964). Rooster was always Rooster, though in early drafts his surname is
Kinkaid or Poindexter. That should put to rest any claim that the
character was based on a real marshal named Cogburn. In a letter from
2000, answering questions from the superintendent of the Fort Smith
National Historic Site, in the western Arkansas city where Mattie first
meets and recruits Rooster, Portis said he landed on the name Cogburn
because it was “Scots,” the background he wanted Rooster to have.
A very early chapter outline using those previous names—typed on
yellow long bond paper (for all you archive nerds)—follows the
well-known beginning of the book: “Carrie opens story”; her father is
killed by Chaney; she travels to Fort Smith, witnesses a hanging,
“[g]oes to trial next day,” and seeks out Rooster afterwards; Evans and
Rooster team up and leave her, but she follows. By Chapter 8 of the
outline, Portis is asking himself “What happens on trail?” The
rattlesnake pit is there from the beginning, but a potential cattle
drive will be dropped and a proposed showdown scene with Rooster and
Odus Wharton, whose family history with Rooster is part of the early
trial scene, winds up mentioned in the final manuscript secondhand, in
Mattie’s postscript to the main events.
In Portis’s case, it’s unclear whether it was the Midgean traction of his native soil that kept him there or some understanding that he could not have built his fiction’s singular and droll terraria nearer to the emanating rays of East Coast fiction in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop—Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic. It’s hard to imagine the bafflement with which Portnoy or Angstrom would have confronted a guy like Jimmy Burns, from “Gringos,” who tries to persuade two young women to move into his hotel with a come-on like this: “The doorknobs are porcelain with many fine hairline cracks. The towels are rough-dried in the sun. Very stiff and invigorating after a bath.”
***
In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him. It’s not just that his novels are gentle and funny; it’s that Portis’s books have a way of conscripting the reader into their governing virtues—punctuality, automotive maintenance, straight talk, emotional continence. Puny virtues, as Portis himself once put it, yet it is a great and comforting gift (in these days especially) to offer readers escape into a place where such virtues reign.
Yeah, he describes our better selves. They might be eccentric but they are admirable.
I woke up with the left arm throbbing, again. At 9:45, I went off to Central Indiana Orthopedic. Then sent me to Well Now, who wanted me to make an appointment with Central Indiana Orthopedic, the preliminary diagnosis is tendonitis. I left Well Now with a splint and instructions: ice, ibuprofen, rest and exercise. I have done all but the exercises. I called off work today. As I told Kh, after leaving the clinic, for the first time in my life I feel I cannot physically do something I ought be able to do.
I did make the interview at one. Losing wages and hours does not sit well with me. I still like my money much too much. Thing is I cannot wreck myself with repetitive motion.
I have been doing the ice and the splint. I hurt less. No longer getting bowled over with the throbbing.
KH says these posts sound like I am falling apart. Maybe I am, but I want to make the record that I am persisting and I am not succumbing to depression. Not quite like it was when it was colitis and my insides were bleeding, or when I kept having staph infections that kept debilitating me.
Around 6, I decided I could get at my email. Here are the results.
From LitHub:
“It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas … Portis’s other novels weren’t exactly Westerns—more like Southwesterns, Headed Easterns, and Getting Losterns—but they are all populated by equally memorable figures…It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country … ‘Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,’ he once explained. That’s true, yet Portis was selling himself short. Although his novels have the fun of farce, part of what’s so charming about them is their relentless plausibility….Even the most outlandish of Portis plots are populated by the kind of Everymen found in almost every Zip Code in this country: barmaids, shopkeeps, shade-tree mechanics, high-and-dry hippies, would-be writers, secretaries, veterans, junkyard scrappers. They are themselves a kind of Library of Americans, and Portis is excellent not only on their day jobs but also on their daydreams and stray thoughts and endogenous knowledge of the world…The descendants of circuit riders and frontier evangelists, they are trying to make sense of the moral universe they’ve inherited and the modern world they’re making as the gravitational pull of grander virtues weakens … Portis’s plots hark back to those moral pilgrimages of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Bunyan. But the stakes in his work are never quite salvation or damnation—there’s nowhere as high as Heaven or as low as Hell. Instead, his pilgrims traverse the eschatological latitudes in between, relying for guidance on the modern scriptures of advertising, legal writs, and road signs … In a Portis novel, when you ride off into the sunset you have to make camp in the dark.”
–Casey Cep on Charles Portis’s Collected Works (The New Yorker)
A similarly titled novella -- "The City, and Its Uncertain Walls" -- was released in a literary magazine in 1980. As it was labeled a failure by Murakami, it did not get novelized.
"I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much. I always wanted to give it a proper form," the 74-year-old said in a recent interview.
The new book is a full-length novel broken into three parts. The first part, told in the first person, reworks the 1980 novella, with the narrator entering a city with high walls where his adolescent crush had told him her true self resides.
In the second part, the protagonist returns to the real world and becomes the director of a small town library in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, where he has a mysterious experience.
A narrative structure that toggles between one world and another is characteristic of Murakami's stories.
From Public Orthodoxy OF CAMELS AND GNATS by Fr. Bohdan Hladio. More on the Orthodox Christian problems in Ukraine.
4/13 9:39 pm
And for some reason, like maybe my mind blanked out, the foregoing did not go up last night. Instead, I find it almost 24 hours later sitting under drafts.
This morning I submitted some stories and found a possible gig.
I left around noon for Hitachi. After stopping at McClure's, I rode the bus over to the factory, feeling bad about having to tell someone I could not do the job. That is a first for me. I had the splint on most of the morning and when I left. I think this thing is a bigger problem than I thought. There is no sense in trying to do what I cannot do well. I also have an interview tomorrow with a gardening company.
Except no one was there. I called in, per instructions. Quitting via voicemail felt cheap and a cheat. I will need to go back Monday.
I stopped at Aldi's, but the checkout line was too slow, and I meant to catch the bus downtown. I ditched all the groceries, only to miss the bus. I walked over to Asian Kitchen and had lunch. Looking at the clock, I decided I could walk back quicker than taking the buses. Which let me find the place for tomorrow morning's interview.
Back here around 2, rent paid, I checked the email and did a little reading, Then around 3, I stopped to ice down the arm. Back around 4.
ONCE AT A party in New York, I met novelist Jonathan Lethem,” Jay Jennings, the editor of Escape Velocity, says in his introduction to this collection of lesser-known writings by and about Charles Portis, the beloved, publicity-allergic writer from Little Rock, Arkansas. “[I] mentioned the idea that [Portis] was our greatest unknown novelist, and he quipped, ‘Yes, he’s everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.’” That’s a good way to think about it. Portis is a rarefied taste, but by now lots of people have acquired it.
See, read him and you get hooked. It is a good thing. You may have to go to a library or shop online to find his books, but you will find yourself wanting to read more. Guess if you are not a reader of fiction, you will not want to read Portis.
Charles Portis has died and he was the funniest novelist since Mark Twain, but it’s easy not to know that. His work barely grazed the mainstream, despite going at least two for five in his attempts to write the great American novel. It isn’t fair. This man put William Shakespeare in the shithouse.
***
You’d expect a near-forgotten cult novelist beloved by other writers to be “difficult,” or to “require context.” But Charles Portis wrote five of the funniest, most accessible novels you will ever read. Not one of his books is an unreadable postmodern cinder block. And this is central to his genius.
***
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.
***
...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.
I think that sums up Portis for me.
What else I have written on Portis can be accessed by starting here.
Now let's see what academia, by way of Scholar Blog, has to say about Charles Portis:
"Style
Charles Portis has been described as “one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction. With an unerring ear for the rhythms of speech and idiosyncrasies of language, he delivers deadpan humor as his characters strive to come to terms with their own limitations and an increasingly cockeyed world” (Cleary 610). He utilizes the effectiveness of humor to define various components of the American character and its spirit.
Yep, he does have a deadpan humor towards the America of his characters. He reminds us how strange is this country.
Themes
The primary theme of Portis’ novels is that of conflict between his characters’ desire for travel and adventure and their attraction to the comforts of home and daily routine (Idol 361). A restless disposition is linked to this impasse. Portis “shows that restlessness has its moments of both high humor and profound sadness. He presents this restlessness as a trait of Americans, as well as a universal fact of man’s existence” (Idol 362).
And is not restlessness an American trait? It is for me.
So, serious commentators and people like me agree this is a man whose novels need be read.
I really like pulp fiction - Hammett, Robert E. Howard - even the pulpiest heroes - Doc Savage, The Shadow - can be fun.
J.M. Coetzee is one writer who I have read less of (two novels, a couple of short stories) than who I found videos on YouTube:
Daphne du Maurier interested me because I have never understood Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". She wrote the story on which it is based.
I managed to read two Iain M. Banks's Culture novels while in prison. If you think you like science fiction, that you have read great science fiction, without reading Banks, then you are missing out. Seriously missing out.
Speaking of Iain Banks:
Michael Connelly is one who I found in prison, and I am still wondering where to place him. He is not a prose stylist, but it is hard not to get attached to his characters.
I have not read much of J.G. Ballard - did I get a novel of his read in prison? I have read much about him. Here is a documentary on him, hopeflly it will inspire you find his books:
Alasdair Gray on writing and painting:
Ross MacDonald:
Groucho, Capote, Ring Lardner:
Indiana represented:
Philip Roth at 70: Interview with David Remnick is not what what I heard on The New Yorker Radio Hour. It is more than that. Roth was one of my great discoveries while in prison. Yes, I knew about him when I was a teenager, but did not read him. I wish I had read him instead of Saul Bellow; Roth's world is far mre accessible to me than Bellows'.
sch 1/5–1/6
While in prison, I read an anthology of Russian fantasy and science fiction. I used the interlibrary loan program to get more current Russian writers; one was Victor Pelevin's A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia. What I picked up was the idea of using fantasy where social realism is insufficient to tell us about life. Why I am adding to this already too long post is that The Guardian published a long read on Pelevin: The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay.
On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.
***
Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.
***
The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope.
Mr. Gelly may be onto something here that applies to Portis' other novels. This conflict between systems and the contradictions that reality imposes on those systems. That I agree with him on how Trump mangles reality with his lies does not affect my opinion on this reading of True Grit.
sch 1/11
Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston - it doe not mention any of her plays, but it does place her memoir high on the list. That is where I started with Hurston. Start, you will not mind going on.
Until today, outside of a handful of scholars, the world had not seen Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod The Great.
Hurston, the accomplished Black writer, folklorist and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, worked for many years on the pages to The Life of Herod the Great until she died in Fort Pierce, Fla., in 1960 at the age of 69.
In this novel, Hurston looked to redefine the legacy of Herod, who reigned as king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. In a 1953 letter to her editor Hurston wrote, "You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man. No matter who talks about him, friend or foe, Herod is a magnificent character."
And today's reading of the Gospel touched on Herod's slaughter of the innocents. I keep saying this, Hurston is very much worth reading. That she was forgotten for so long is a blot on America's literary conscience.
Gallardo: I wanted to talk about Jan. 7 when the novel debuts, which would have been Hurston's 134th birthday. What should the world remember about Hurston?
Plant: She loved life. And she loved humanity. And everything she did, her anthropological work, her work as a novelist, dramatist, her political activism, everything was about having us see one another as different variations of divine expression … We want to remember her as a humanitarian who was courageous in her effort to have us see ourselves, whole and complete. Undiminished.
Here are five reasons writing a story is possibly the most powerful act for good you will ever accomplish in your life.
And they are good reasons. They buoyed my feelings this morning of excruciating pain and disgust.
I came to Leonard Cohen late in life. Of Federico Garcia Lorca, I read his plays in prison. I offer “In love for life”: The poet who changed Leonard Cohen’s life by Callum MacHattie to point out the strange ways inspiration pollinates creativity.
However, decades before, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was forging the path upon which Cohen’s lyrics would follow. Lorca was a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, a collection of Spanish poets in the 1920s who spearheaded a movement that showcased romance and tragedy through surrealist imagery. While Cohen’s work has carved him an individual lane in contemporary music, he has often cited Lorca’s work as deeply formative in terms of his influence: “I was fifteen when I began to read Federico Garcia Lorca. His poems perhaps have had the greatest influence on my texts. He summoned up a world where I felt at home. His images were sensual and mysterious: ‘throw a fist full of ants to the sun.’ I wanted to be able to write something like that as well”.
Until today, I never heard of Kate Braverman. That I is due to The Paris Review posting her short story Histories of the Undead. I am thinking hard about my prose for "Chasing Ashes". I like Braverman's style - it has an energy that I think mine lacks.
She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.
The Paris Review also posted a link to Kate Braverman Is Dead by Leah Mensch. I like Ms. Mensch's prose, too.
In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”
For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.
From what I read about Braverman, another American writer ignored by America.
So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.”
And people wonder why women got angry at us men:
Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.
I sit here amazed by her story.
sch 1/13
Back in the archive, I posted about Lincoln Michel inveighing against novels slavishly imitating film. He posted a link to an earlier entry in this discussion, Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick. When I was filling the holes in my literary education during my prison stay, I began noticing the differences between Nineteenth Century novels and those of the Twentieth Century. I put this down to film coming into its own after 1915. Check out the difference between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and James Jones's From Here to Eternity - in terms of themes, but as to the visuals contained in the stories. Jones's novel was filmed much more easily than ever has been the case of War and Peace. Hemingway and Hammett are much easier adapted to film.
The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue.
A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.
You say you never heard of Charles Portis. This is the guy who wrote True Grit.
I read True Grit twice. Once decades ago and once in prison. My copy has disappeared. It is an amazing novel which neither movie quite captured. I managed also to read Dog of the South. Try to find his nooks. The man was brilliant.
Portis’s imagination is truly wild—both unhampered and unpredictable—and reading him for the first time required a significant adjustment to all my previously gathered knowledge of what a person can or should put in a novel if they want it to be good. He is unbeatable at the non sequitur, so that every paragraph contains the possibility of crazed escalation. A conversation Ray has about the Bible with Reo Symes’s mother’s weird friend, Melba, starts with her asking him about a particular bit of Scripture and ends with her saying she will thank him to remember that “all the little animals of your youth are long dead.”
***
...The effect of these is to reveal that other people’s inner lives are remarkable, that each of us is walking around, at least 20 percent of the time, wanting the answers to questions no one else would have thought up if they lived to be as old as the hills. It’s hilarious to be in the company of a writer who thinks like this, who has his protagonist make sweeping, unkind observations about the financial habits of children or participate in arguments about who invented the clamp: “The principle of the clamp was probably known to the Sumerians. You can’t go around saying this fellow from Louisiana invented the clamp.”
Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.
Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For
those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic
Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting,
talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few
there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had
only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling
tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about
the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his
interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.
The
series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not
survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on
Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to
understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s
knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more
inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from
dozens of cultures.
***
Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the
annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an
aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our
literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the
exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a
characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its
underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero
was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the
people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or
mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are
superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2
***
1Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia,
Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed
to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood
executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the
journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.
While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.
There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:
Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:
The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.
Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.
The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him.
Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.
I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.
Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.
Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.
Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.
This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.
David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.
Writers on Writing (60 Minutes)
Well, this post is more than long enough. I hope these were of help and/or inspiration for you.
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:
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.
...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.
This video examines Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye by way of Anthony Burgess. While The Long Goodbye is not my least favorite Chandler novel (that will always be The High Window), it has always been a hard read for me. It is not much of a detective novel. After listening to the podcast, I see it now as a novel about Los Angeles, and about friendship. That makes it more sensible to me. (BTW, my favorite Chandler novels are Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, and The Lady in the Lake.)
(Some views on The Long Goodbye, that I could not resist adding here
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.
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.
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 readThe Duchess of Malfi. More reading, still not done.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
***
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 books are:
Sterne: Tristram Shandy 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
