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.
Showing posts with label WILLIAM MAXWELL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WILLIAM MAXWELL. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
JULIEN GRACQ, GLENWAY WESCOTT, JULIAN GREEN, WILLIAM MAXWELL
57
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
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
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