A PURPOSELESS PUGATORY

I have not been posting at the blog for some time.  The isolation of the writer has never been greater and now when there are no longer any book sections in American newspapers that even attempt to describe... the best books... when to look at The New York Times Book Review is to be insulted.  Mediocrity seems the only quality  they seek to praise.  The Wall Street Journal continues on Saturday to publish a book section but literature is by no means its focus... and while the pieces on history and art etc are of interest they usually lack authority.  I know no one who reads The New York Review of Books... but it should have died a long time ago... though the publisher New York Review Books is now one of the great world publishers as it is about the only publisher that has not been totally swamped by political correctness coupled with an adoration of identity politics... and earlier this month I was invited to Beloit College to read.

SELF-QUOTING from a page on Facebook

Invited by English Department at Beloit College. Gave craft talk in basement classroom to 20 students. One question. Read for 30 minutes with no questions to be asked by audience. Four faculty in audience plus the professor who invited me... mostly students from his class. No one talked to me. Two dinners with 3 faculty members. One serve-yourself-lunch with one faculty member. The college seemed in emotional lockdown with students incredibly atomized and solitary... public spaces sparsely populated and when not so mostly individuals looking at cellphone and laptops... reminded me of my experience when visiting universities in East Germany in 1965 and Bulgaria in 1967... a touchable dutiful silence. But at Beloit, people seemed in shock after two years of bruising nasty arguments about identity... the chair of the English department mentioned that the chair rotated and it was his turn to take out the garbage... while said with levity I found myself shocked at the  so evident self-contempt... and finally I was told the new head of library does not have a degree in library science and first order of business is to throw away 50,000 books... to be decided by an information expert which is the jargon for a non-expert in books.


 TALKING AT

             by  Thomas McGonigle

                  BACK FROM BELOIT

-he remembers saying to Anna as he was driving from Wisconsin for Chicago:  how easy it is to go full speed into an abutment of a highway overpass. 

-the sentence was spoken calmly and precisely and Anna did not respond.

-Explain.

-he was invited out to Beloit College to read from his books and to give a craft talk.

-he was a student at Beloit College and was given a BA degree in 1966.  He dropped out of the college for the academic year 1964-65 to be a student at University College, Dublin and made his first journey to the East by going in the spring of 65 to the German Democratic Republic, the DDR.

-Anna and he flew from Newark, New Jersey in the early morning of November 7, to Chicago, Illinois, rented a car at the airport and drove up to Beloit. 

-they flew back from Chicago on Sunday arriving at midnight in New Jersey.

-3 nights in the Beloit College guesthouse and one night in a motel in Appleton, Wisconsin. 

-Other than Beloit they were in the following places or cities: Madison, Verona, Fort Atkinson, Oshkosh, Neenah, Menasha, Appleton, Watertown. 

-According to the car rental receipt, 116 miles were driven which must have been a mistake as the mileage between all these cities and the going to and from Chicago is at least 444 miles, he was saying, though it might be possible to think it had only happened in his imagination or in his hope for it to have happened or he had it confused with another trip to the mid-west:

1

-He was to be saying and he did not say, My first attempt at…  allowed me to resort to the sayings:  that instead of history--- my last year at Beloit--- repeating as farce the three nights at Beloit seemed to be a dropping into a purgatory with no prospect at the end of being …. I need not fill out the traditional belief but I would wish to avoid the easy resorting to saying, it seemed like a dropping into an abyss.

--He writes and then said,  On November 6, 1918 my first literary creation died or should I say--- I ruthlessly and out of necessity killed him as sure as the imaginary German bullet--- and thus begun the writing that lead me to this moment of my reading talking to and with you.  The person to whom that writing had been directed to did not respond to it and I discovered here in the library of Beloit College that I had been not alone in writing with such a purpose as I shared that with Dante and Petrarch who each had begun out the same impulse but I didn’t learn until much later the reality I came to find myself in--- as Turgenev remarked: I write for my five unknown readers and find myself as lonely as a finger.  That war---World War One---ended as you might remember on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th day in November, 1918. When I finally did talk with the girl to whom that first writing was meant, she admitted she had read the story as I had kept her first name, Melinda and added an L to her Brady, but she never approached me and yet she wondered how I had known her birthday was November 6?  This of course was a long time ago before the current moment when a simple search on the internet reveals such information so easily… but I had wrote with her in the mind of my creation based on seeing her one morning on the second floor of Patchogue High School.  I was a senior and she was a sophomore… now, in the present which seems more fictional than that other fiction, the past, we are two people who have  been married three times and she lives in a great house on  large tract of land in rural northern Maine and I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and find myself spending long weekends at a near lakeside house with my wife, 30 miles from that apartment. In New Jersey, in a town with a Main Street that is crossed by Haig, Pershing, Joffre and Foch streets with a little side avenue named for Petain and there is an American Legion Hall named for Joyce Kilmer 

-BUT every writer should have at least one great prejudice that is beyond argument and I will name Julian Green as the great writer of the 20^th Century and I hope to read and to  be read to on my death bed. 

-Julian Green American born not made as he liked to say was the only American in the French Academy and the first non-French person in that body.  He succeeded to the chair that had been occupied by Francois Mauriac…  but for the immediate purpose of this talk there is in his PERSONAL RECORD 1928-1939 a link to another writer who I always think of as being the great writer of Wisconsin GLENWAY WESCOTT.

Green kept a diary as did his friends Gide and Mauriac and all of it along with all his writings are published in the Pleiade edition and he might have the largest number of volumes in that series… but the quote : 19 December 1928.  Lunched yesterday with Wescott.  He told me that it seemed to him impossible for a journal to be written that should be absolutely sincere and bear the stamp of truth.  But sincerity is a gift--- one among others.  To wish to be sincere is not enough.”

-Knowing that was my introduction to Julian who I first visited in Paris.  I would see him for almost the next two decades and did a profile of him for The Guardian in London which was a little embarrassed to publish since that paper was aggressively liberal and skeptical of religion but with Green that allowed me to report that when I asked him what he looked forward to at 90, he simply said Purgatory. 

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS.  THE DECEMBER ISSUE OF THE HOLLINS CRITIC IS TO HAVE MY VERY LONG ESSAY ON ANNIVERSARIES BY UWE JOHNSON... THAT CAN WITHOUT HYPE BE COMPARED WITH THE GREAT BOOKS OF JOYCE, PROUST AND MUSIL...  ANNIVERSARIES IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM NOW FROM NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS..AND I WOULD OFFER A MONEY BACK GUARANTEE AS TO ITS QUALITY... ONCE BEGUN TO READ YOU WILL AT THE END BE SADDENED THAT THE BOOK IS ONLY 1600+ PAGES AND YOU AVE NOW LIVED EITHER AGAIN OR FOR THE FIRST TIME THOUGH THOSE YEARS FROM AUGUST 1967-1968 AND AT THE SAME TIME BACK TO THE 1930S BOTH AT FIRST IN GERMANY AND THEN LATER IN NEW YORK CITY.

MIDNIGHT MASS AND JULIAN GREEN AND ME

      Many years ago in Paris I was telling Julian Green of being an altar boy at St. Francis De Sales Church in Patchogue and having the feeling that I was sitting on the lap of Jesus. "O, how I envy you," Green said, "I converted too late."

      Last night at Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew Church here in Milltown/East Brunswick, New Jersey I finally really understood what Green meant.  Back then I thought how could this member of the French Academy (the only foreigner and an American), this prolific author of books that would survive his own mortality, this close friend of Gide and Mauriac envy me anything?  

       As I was attending Mass last night with my wife Anna--- with whom I had earlier that morning gone to the Estonian Lutheran Church Christmas service down in Lakewood--- I thought of serving Midnight Mass in Patchogue so many years ago and I thought of other Midnight Christmas Masses I attended: in 1968 in Menasha, Wisconsin with my parents when I had come back from Ireland and Bulgaria with Lilia, in 1972 in Saugerties three days after the death of my mother,  in the tiny Catholic church in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1973 after the death of my father the previous August... and more recently over the years with my children Elizabeth and Lorcan and their mother in St. Brigid's Church on Tompkins Square and more recently for many years with Anna at Presentation on East Third Street...  

       And of course finally I really knew now why Green was envious of me:  the belief that comes both before and after reason--- he had once written a short book attacking the rationality of the French church--- which of course is the great flaw of French civilization.  

     One hopes to never lose that belief though so often it can get lost in the clutter of argument for finally argument is always a celebration of a sort of unappetizing arrogance.  

    The true grandeur of the church lies in the fragility of that memory of serving Midnight Mass at St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue.  

       

RESISTING BEING A CRANK

RESISTING BEING A CRANK

    (Typed while listening to Secondhand Daylight by Magazine)

PREFACE ONE

…where he remarked that I was the only person in the world to have the problem of Dalkey Archive Press again not scheduling the book they bought of yours 2 years ago ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974--- who in the world gives a fuck about one more book not appearing?

PREFACE TWO

I would rather be writing about Andrei Bitov’s forthcoming THE SYMMETRY TEACHER or WHY CAN THE DEAD DO SUCH GREAT THINGS? By Robert Bartlett or LA GRANDE by Juan Jose Saer.

PREFACE THREE

From a letter written a few days ago to John O’Brien, owner and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press.::::in  a letter from February, 1982 to Helen and Mike Oldfield in London I mentioned  I was looking forward to the first week in  March when I would receive a copy of the Review of Contemporary Fiction which is to contain the first excerpts of ST. PATRICK'S DAY.

Finally, I have always valued our long personal and professional friendship and hope that Dalkey Archive will see this book into print  (as per the contract you signed on May 20, 2012)or is this the beginning of a certain death spiral for DA given the rather dire economic situation which  (possibly)does not allow for its publication?  The latter consideration grows out of having lived/worked through the deaths of two bookstores here in New York City and witnessed the numerous deaths of various publishing enterprises--- I hope I am very wrong.

        HOW I DIED as an author.  The limitations of the English language are immediately available in trying to understand the differences between an author, a writer, a novelist, a poet, a dramatist, a script writer, a journalist, a publicist, a critic

        I take it that an author is someone who has published a book and that book has been read by someone other than him or herself and the person he or she is sentimentally entangled with. 

        From now on I shall talk in my person as a he.

        An author has been paid by someone for that book or rather someone has paid to read that book.  Freud going against his Hippocratic Oath as a medical doctor insisted on being paid to listen to his patients and if they did not pay that would undermine their ability to get better. 

        It is my understanding a book is completed by the reader.  This step turns a writer a poet a novelist into an author.

        Of course in French this has all been teased out into incomprehensibility.

        My death as an author happened yesterday, 7 May 2014 in the morning when I read the 2014 catalogue for Dalkey Archive and discovered ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 is not scheduled for publication during that season.

        Two years ago on May 20, 2012 the publisher of Dalkey Archive, John O’Brien, and I signed a contract to publish ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974.  The book was to be published within two years of that month. 

        Dalkey Archive published in hardcover in 1987 and 1992 two books of mine THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  Northwestern University Press published a paperback version of THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV in 2000 and in 2010  Dalkey Archive finally published a paperback version of GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  These books remain “in print.”

        Have I become a crank?

        Self-warning.

        The world is full of such people and when I used to go to the The 55  on Christopher Street I was aware this bar collected a large number of ex-winners and people into downward mobility. 

        Of course over the years the bar had been decorated by the appearance of such writers as David Markson and William Gaddis and the most memorable of personages, Jason Holliday  who as you might remember was  Shirley Clarke’s PORTRAIT OF JASON--- Jason would show you the newspaper clipping with the wonderful comment by his good friend, Ingmar Bergman, on that movie… "the most extraordinary film I've seen in my life.”

        And once I was in the Bleecker Street Cinema for a screening of PORTRAIT OF JASON in the late afternoon and discovered down front from where I was sitting, in the nearly empty theater, Jason was there admiring, LOOK at that handsome MAN on the screen, as he was saying out loud to himself.

        I will not go into the fate of Jason, up there living in the Y in Harlem, as he said, among the niggers or visiting   Jason when he was in Bellevue complaining, the niggers are stealing my drugs.

        No.  The temptation is there and must be resisted. 

        Of late I have been visiting an old friend the painter John Wesley who lives on Washington Square Park.  On the opposite corner many years before Marcel Duchamp came and played chess in his later years.  He knew and often talked about--- in the same language and thinking of T. S. Eliot---  that the vast majority of what is called art what is called writing would be and is  swept away, utterly no matter the intentions, the apparent immediate popularity or lack of attention and the most honest answer I have ever recorded was when I asked Julian Green what he looked forward to in his 90^th year  and he replied, To be standing before God and to finally know exactly who I am, free of all the illusions, the little lies knowing I am going to Purgatory.”

PAUL MORAND, ANTAL SZERB, JULIAN GREEN: Essential Books from PUSHKIN PRESS

C

On my shelves by PAUL MORAND:

Black Magic
Earth Girdled
Green Shoots (Preface by Marcel Proust)
Fancy Goods and Open All Night (translated by Ezra Pound)
Open All Night (translated by HBV)
Closed All Night
The Living Buddha (two different translations)
1900 A.D.
World Champions
Nothing but the Earth
Lewis and Irene
Europe at Love
East India and Company
Orient Air Express
Indian Air
The Captive Princess
Montociel
New York
Le Voyage (a photocopy)

All of these books are out of print though the New Directions’ edition of Ezra Pound’s translation of Fancy Goods/ Open All Night is available.

This IS NOT to go on about out of print books.

D

New York though published in 1930 is still a good guide book for New York, much in the same way that The American Scene by Henry James is a good introduction to the United States if read with Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

E

Pushkin Press based in London publishes what are the prettiest and most elegant books in the English language world. Readers already well know this,one hopes, and have read for instance the four novels by Antal Szerb that they have brought over into English and by so doing restored or placed them and him into the pantheon of world literature: JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND, THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE, and OLIVER VII. Like Sandor Marai, Szerb came to an awful end but their books and those of certain contemporary Hungarian writers would suggest that Hungarian is one of the great world literary languages…

From JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT: “He was a really devout Catholic, as Jewish converts often are. Their centuries of tradition haven’t been eroded the way they have for us… He cut out of his life everything that was not purely Catholic. He guarded his soul’s salvation with a revolver.”

F

But it is Paul Morand at the moment that Pushkin Press is revealing anew to the English speaking (reading?) world .

They started with VENICES. Note the plural. A book of fragments memories both from reading and from life: An overcast October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them …

Then on to THE ALLURE OF CHANEL, the notes to a biography never written, from the time when he was seeing her after World War Two, after that moment when they had both chosen the wrong side, as history revealed only later…
Chanel is speaking: I have dressed the world and today it goes about naked.
All of that delights me. All of that satisfies this deep taste for destruction and evolution that is within me. Life is recognizable through its inconsistencies

G

(Both books were translated by Euan Cameron who also translated for Pushkin Press Julian Green’s THE OTHER SLEEP.

Green is another writer who seems so essential and one finds every once in the while another who dips, as do I, into his Diary and finds no matter what passage is read that as a result the world seems a little larger and not really as... it surely is…)

H

And now HECATE AND HER DOGS:

“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“And you?”
“Nothing.”
This was the distilled essence of all our conversations, the words most frequently used by lovers everywhere, emblem of the total vacuum in which they coexist.

GLENWAY WESCOTT, LARRY WOIWODE, WILLIAM MAXWELL ...THE PERIL OF ... A LONGING FOR CERTAINTY... AN OPERATION... ROBERT PINGET, JULIAN GREEN

FIRST OF TWO PARTS.

I have been reading A STEP FROM DEATH by Larry Woiwode in preparation for a review.
Already I know I will not be allowed to go on about THE GRANDMOTHERS by Glenway Wescott and possibly THE DEATH OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green because there are space considerations which I understand and accept.

For the longest time I have believed that if I had to pick one modern American novel as the best American novel I would say it is THE GRANDMOTHERS. The novel is basically about a Wisconsin family and its dispersal across the country and overseas. The novel is made of a number of voices and the prose is poised and eloquent.

Edward Dahlberg, the severest and most stringent of critics, held Wescott in high esteem and was one of Wescott's few supporters as a literary artist in the long teasing out of his public life...

Wescott did write one more significant novel THE PILGRIM HAWK but his whole career revolved around THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story for GOODBYE WISCONSIN.

I have mentioned him before as he is cited in the Julian Green's diaries. I remember talking with Green about Wescott who Green still vividly remembered fifty years after they had met for the first time. We talked of Hemingway's great hatred of Wescott which was a dreary mixture of jealousy, envy and sexual incompleteness on Hemingway's part.

All of Wescott's career revolved around the great success of THE GRANDMOTHERS. And it is this sort of success and burden that Larry Woiwode also shares: all of his books both before and after are planets revolving about the great sun of his BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. Woiwode has not to date been able to find his THE PILGRIM HAWK as he has made other choices in his life.

In my little garden Woiwode nudges Wescott over a little bit...

In A STEP FROM DEATH Woiwode again takes up the decisive role that William Maxwell played in his life. And I would like eventually to write about Maxwell but the Library of America as foolishly published the first of two volumes devoted to Maxwell but are forcing us to wait until September for the second volume.

Hannah Green and I went to the memorial service for Glenway Wescott and we talked with William Maxwell. He too joined us in understanding just how important THE GRANDMOTHERS was to all of us and he shared our dismay thatit seemed to have fallen into a sort of obscurity...

Wescott was a public figure. He was president of one of the American academies... he was "distinguished"... but is as far as I know, in this country at least, the exception to the rule: such figures are usually deeply rotten at the literary core...

SECOND OF TWO PARTS.

In two days I have to have an operation.

One of those walk in walk out things but still I am to be put to sleep for a time.

Do you all remember FERNWOOD TONIGHT when Martin Mull had on the guy with the DRIVE -IN DO IT YOURSELF SURGICAL CLINIC?

It is unclear how many days or weeks of pain afterward.

The sort of operation called routine.

The beginning of old age or just another sure step like a broken tooth--- and I got one of those for tomorrow...

One thinks of not waking up.

Edward Dahlberg thought it normal to think of suicide at least once a day.

Maybe the wife will hit the medical malpractice jackpot.

She won't have to throw out by herself all the literary rubbish I leave behind...

I have to call it that: what else to call unpublished books?

To echo what Lawrence Durrell once told me in 1970 in New York City on West 110th Street: What has posterity ever done for me?

Of course these unpublished books are not rubbish but they will be treated as rubbish...

Enough of me.

Here is a nice bit from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET (translated by Barbara Wright):

When you think of all the work that must have gone into getting all those papers together, classifying them, numbering them, and the fiddling about with them and rewriting from beginning to end that shatteringly incoherent narrative, those cries of distress, maniac's visions, expressions of anguish, premonitions...
This never-ending old age, while the days are dawning anew, it was no use marking the pages it doesn't apply any more, a book it's impossible to read without suffering disaster.

JULIEN GRACQ, GLENWAY WESCOTT, JULIAN GREEN, WILLIAM MAXWELL

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The news arrives of the death of Julien Gracq.

If you were reading the New York Times you learned nothing of who this man was and why--- for those who read--- it is a very sad moment and also a moment when it can finally be said that all the "old ones" are now dead.

(A very good obituary by the translator James Kirkup can be found in The Independent newspaper from London. The last line, "HE and his work are lessons to our expiring humanity."

***

We living in the present--- those of us who claim to write--- are now all alone.

Julian Gracq has now finally joined Ernst Junger, Julian Green, Francis Stuart, Glenway Wescott, E. M. Cioran, Edward Dahlberg, Nina Berberova, Jorge Luis Borges and--- I would add personally though I well know she does not rank in this listing--- Hannah Green, though with her THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE, if she had lived longer and been able to finish her second book, might have been comfortably installed within this group.

To have known these writers, to have read them, to have talked with them, to have seen them is to have been given the gift of participating in literature, in writing and reading as it once was and is now no longer so.

***

In Julian Green's diary, "Lunch yesterday with Wescott. He told me that it seemed to him impossible for a journal to be written that should be absolutely sincere and bear the stamp of truth. But sincerity is a gift--- one among others. To wish to be sincere is not enough..."

***

Thanks to Turtle Point Press the reader today can find these books by Julien Gracq:
READING WRITING, THE SHAPE OF A CITY, THE NARROW WATERS, KING COPHETUA. In the shops you might be able to find second hand copies of THE CASTLE OF ARGOL, THE OPPOSING SHORE, THE DARK STRANGER, BALCONY IN THE FOREST. At www.junger.org you can read Gracq's essay on Ernst Junger's ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS which should then lead you to STORM OF STEEL.

So from READING WRITING:

---The creative artist who steps back and tries to understand what he is doing stands before his canvas as before a green and intact prairie: for the writer, the literary material he would like to recapture in its freshness is already similar to what passes from the second to the third stomach of a ruminant.

---At ninety, no writer, if he is still writing, can hope to maintain all the quality of his production. But in painting, Titian and Picasso--- others,too,no doubt--- manage perfectly well. No writer is brilliant until full adolescence at least. But, in music, Mozart--- others,too, no doubt--- was. Which tends to corroborate physiologically the hierarchy of the arts as promulgated by Hegel (which is fine by me). Historical counterproof would provide the same result: of all the arts, literature was last to appear. And one day, no doubt, it will be the first to be eclipsed

---Nine-tenths of the pleasures we owe to art over a lifetime are conveyed not by direct contact with the world but by memory alone. How little we have preoccupied ourselves, however, with the different nature, fidelity, and intensity of forms cloaked in memory, depending on whether it is a painting, a piece of music, or a poem!

58

If you wish to see proof of what I have been writing read carefully all the reviews of the Library of America volume of the works of William Maxwell being published in January. Not a single reviewer will question why this and the second one in the Fall is being published. Not a single review will question why there has not been a volume devoted to the work of Glenway Wescott whose novels permit the emergence of someone like William Maxwell, whose whole literary reputation begins and ends with his connection as fiction editor to The New Yorker magazine. Maxwell was a decent writer and human being, fortunate in those he edited and who claim him as an inspiration but his writing is nothing more than that. It does not re-arrange in any way the statues in the garden. One might thing of his writing as being a bench with a brass plaque attached.

***

This writing on this Christmas morning is finally dedicated to Anna Saar McGonigle who suggested I launch myself into this form of writing

ST MARK'S BOOKSHOP, RAYMOND QUENEAU, JULIAN GREEN, VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY

One of the real benefits of living on East First Street in Manhattan is that it is within walking distance of ST MARK'S BOOKSHOP.

It is the BEST bookshop in the United States.

I have not been to Denver or to Portland so until I have seen the bookstores there I am willing to admit that possibly there is a better bookshop than St. Mark's in the US.

One quick test of your local bookshop would be: go in and see if they have up front a copy of the new selection of essays by Raymond Queneau LETTERS NUMBERS FORMS from the University of Illinois Press as did St Mark's on Sunday night.

Of course you know the work of Raymond Queneau: Zazi, The Bark Tree, We Always Treat Women Too Well, The Sunday of Life, Children of Clay

Sunday night I noticed that Queneau has a teasing sort of essay about the diary of Julian Green...

(I always write his first name Julian since I approach him always as an American writer who happens to write in French; I well know that in France he is Julien Green)

And while it will be another day before I write about the necessity of reading Julian Green--- I wanted to acknowledge one of the genuine good reasons to be living on East First Street.

If you can not WALK to a good bookstore--- and I have just defined one above--- you are not living a civilized life. As to why this is true I am going to avoid answering that question beyond saying: as you continue to read these lines if you do so you will come to understand in a way superior to that easy simple answer I could well construct for my question.

Finally further substantiation of the above: a week ago I discovered not up front but on the ordinary shelves at St Mark's Bookshop ENERGY OF DELUSION by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive)--- written in Shklovsky's 88th year--- is the best critical book to be published this year for those who like to think in such terms: concerned with the idea of plot in novels... but that title: Shklovsky quotes a letter from Tolstoy who is consoling a friend who has been experiencing difficulty,

"I know this feeling very well-- even now, I have been experiencing it lately; everything seems to be ready for writing--- for the fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent. and it's impossible to begin without it."

Shklovsky is the great formalist critic who makes us aware of novels as novels, stories as stories. He takes them apart and shows how they work as if they were machines made of words and words made into sentences arranged in a particular way. His writing is crystal clear, unburdened by jargon and his authority comes from his own literary works separate from his critical work: ZOO OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE and A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY: MEMOIRS, 1917-1922--- just as the authority of T.S. Eliot as a critic comes from THE WASTE LAND and FOUR QUARTETS, just as the authority of Ezra Pound as critic comes from his poetry and THE CANTOS...