Why Muriel Spark switched publishers
March 3, 2010 | Comments Off
I’ve been gearing up for Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography by revisiting (and reading more of) her own fiction, which was evidently treated as unsaleable for much of her career. In 1999, she told Janice Galloway:
“I used to be sold the idea that what I was writing was some little cult and people wouldn’t buy the things. Publishers used to go on that way until I just got rid of them.”“How?”
“I got new publishers.”
Here, for no particular reason except that I’m caught up in scrutinizing her work, are the first sentences of nine of her twenty-two books:
The Comforters: “On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.”
Memento Mori: “Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain pen and continued her letter: ‘One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.’”
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: “The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be taken away.”
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Great Aunt Maude’s… official state archives
March 1, 2010 | Comments Off
My mysterious great aunt has an official archive, apparently. While trying to get my hands on it, I’ve run up against some of the microfilm problems Nicholson Baker detailed in Double Fold.
Some background: In November, I learned that Maude Newton Simmons, my great-great aunt and (self-given) namesake, was a teacher, an architectural drafter, and a dealer of King Midget cars. The 1977 Delta Democrat-Times profile I unearthed even included a photograph of her, at 92, looking out the window of her vehicle. (That Newspaper Archive subscription was so worth it.)
Shortly after posting about the article, I typed her full married name into Google — you’d think I would’ve done this before — and discovered that Maude was also a writer of sorts. No wonder the family was so cagey about her.
Astonishingly, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains a “Maude C. (Newton) Simmons collection” devoted to a newspaper column that she published from 1960-1970.
This collection consists of two 35 mm, positive microfilm rolls of newspaper articles, newsclippings, and correspondence of Maude Newton Simmons. The materials are generally not organized by date or format.The majority of the newspaper articles by Simmons are typewritten and undated. However, there are a few handwritten articles, and several articles are annotated with her corrections. Her “Drew Doings” articles contained a number of subheadings that varied with each issue. Each article in the column concerned a variety of subjects, including births, deaths, church and school news, politics, sports, topics of community interest, visitors, and poetry composed by Simmons or published authors.
So essentially these are church supper bulletins, but also Civil Rights-Era dispatches from the Mississippi Delta.
I’m nervous to read what Maude had to say, but of course I called the library immediately. After several letters back and forth, and a check that was mailed and returned, I’ve learned that the microfilm is badly eroded, and that there are too many pages for the library’s research staff to photograph.
Short of hopping on a plane to Jackson, I’m going to need to purchase copies of the microfilm reels themselves, from an independent vendor, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Then I’ll have to figure out the best way to read them. The good people at Ask MeFi had some excellent suggestions. If you have any to add, please drop me a line.
On illness — real and imagined — and art
February 26, 2010 | Comments Off
My appreciation of Brian Dillon’s The Hypochondriacs is up at NPR. If you have health problems, or worry that you have health problems, or both, you should read this book.
People who never get sick might enjoy it, too — if only for the opportunity to feel superior while jogging around the park in the snow — but I wouldn’t know about that.
An excerpt of my reaction:
I spent so much of my childhood sick, worried about getting sick, or pretending to be sick that these three states of being blurred together in my mind. The confusion persists; now a documented sufferer of autoimmune disease — and an undocumented sufferer of a no-doubt-fatal disorder currently manifesting as side pain — I am uncertain when to take a sick day or visit the doctor, and whatever course I decide on is almost always wrong. Yes, I belong to that most exasperating class of neurotics: hypochondriacs with health problems, the subject of Brian Dillon’s sympathetic, perceptive and often absurdly funny The Hypochondriacs.Until the 19th century, morbid fear of illness was seen as only one symptom of hypochondria, which doctors treated as an organic disease, although scientific explanations varied. In one era, it was a digestive problem, in another an abdominal issue, and later a disorder linked with melancholia and distributed through the entire body. More importantly for Dillon’s purposes, hypochondria, which often has a physical component, provides a reason for those with intellectual or creative temperaments to sequester themselves from the world and pursue their thinking or their art.
Dillon is an unusually dexterous writer. Each of his slim chapters focuses on a different artist or thinker, and each fully evokes the subject’s fears and afflictions, showing how they’re reflected in his or her life’s work.
You can read the rest here, and an excerpt from the book here.
See also Daphne Merkin’s review for Bookforum and Laura Miller’s for Salon, Hermione Lee on bed rest and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay (and her rejection of the idea that suffering begets art), Brian Dillon’s Book Notes for Largehearted Boy, and an old post of mine about being a hypochondriac with health issues.
Nabokov’s The Original of Laura as performance art?
February 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Vladimir Nabokov famously instructed his wife Vera to destroy his final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, if he didn’t live to complete it. At his death, the draft consisted of a stack of notecards which he’d shuffled through, added to, and rewritten right up until the end.
Vera, having once saved an early version of Lolita from the incinerator, found herself unable to carry out his wishes. The task fell to their son, Dmitri, who waffled for years — publicly and dramatically but also somewhat understandably so, for not only had Nabokov reaped the benefits of the Lolita rescue, he’d approved of the decision to save Kafka’s drafts against the author’s express commands. While Nabokov may have claimed to believe that every artist should “ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication,” many of his own papers survived him.
All the post-death uncertainty over the fate of the book culminated, finally, in publication last fall. The Original of Laura is a facsimile series of the original index cards, with transcriptions below them, which can be detached along their perforated edges and held in the hand just like Nabokov’s.
The story being unfinished, character development is slight. The most remarkable aspects of the nubile love interest, a young woman with the “frail, docile frame” of a child, are the men who desire her: her mother’s lecherous charmeur, whose name, “no doubt assumed,” is Hubert H. Hubert (Lolita’s Humbert in a new incarnation?); her own novelist lover, who “destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her”; and her husband, Peter Wild, a stingy, obese, and lovelorn neurologist with tiny feet. Despite all that’s missing in The Original of Laura, though, an intensity characteristic of Nabokov’s work (and missing in most of the self-consciously experimental fiction that purports to borrow from his) pervades it.
Wild strives to inflict upon himself the “sweetest death,” to will himself out of being, body part by body part, starting with his toes and working upward, in an act of “self-deletion.” For all their abstraction, these passages are fresh and surprising and sometimes moving. And as many have observed, the final card in the series presents a list of synonyms for annihilation — “efface, expunge, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” — that, inevitably, casts us back to a consideration of its author’s fate.
The Original of Laura is not really a novel. It is a fascinating artifact, an almost-story that thwarts immersion by continually calling attention to its architect. As I made my way through the notes, I kept imagining the author of Pale Fire and Look at the Harlequins!, at his most mischievous and perverse, plotting not just this last book, but the whole publish-or-destroy drama it engendered, from his deathbed.
Other commentary: Aleksandar Hemon, Why The Original of Laura should never have become a book.; Stoppard, Burn It; Banville, Nabokov’s Laura is “little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet“; David Lodge, Shored against his ruins; Jeanette Winterson, “a sane decision.”
Dolen Perkins-Valdez at Girls Write Now’s Chapters
February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
The first installment of Chapters, the Girls Write Now reading series I’m curating, will feature the talented Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of the new novel Wench.
She’ll be introduced by my friend and fellow board member Tayari Jones, and after her guest reading, several of the girls will share their own work. The event is this Friday at the Center for Fiction, 6 p.m., and we’d love to see you there.
Below, in the spirit of the evening, Perkins-Valdez reminisces about books she read in her youth. You can also listen to her discussing Wench on NPR with Lynn Neary.
I grew up in a world that predated mega-bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. We did not spend our weekends exploring the library or checking out the new releases shelf.
As a result, when I am asked about books I read growing up, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never read any classics of children’s literature. Black Beauty? No. Little Women? No. But the one place I did go every week was the supermarket.
My mother spent many hours shopping for the family each week, and she did not mind if I threw a book in the cart. So I grew up reading all kinds of trashy fiction. I devoured the books voraciously, sometimes in a single night. Through them, I developed a love of reading.
Later, I moved on to Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. That is why when people ask me what I think about “urban fiction” versus “serious fiction,” I hesitate to feed the hierarchical distinction. I know from experience that any kind of fiction can act as a “gateway drug” to another kind. I believe the important thing is that young people read!
I want to introduce my daughter to all kinds of fiction, and through the exposure, let her discover that which speaks to her most.
Many thanks to artist Michael Fusco for the striking Chapters flyer.
Asking the questions: the Walker Percy documentary
February 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Winston Riley has posted a new teaser for his Walker Percy documentary. This one coincidentally relates to my recent post (and your comments) about the interconnectedness of stories and ideas.
While Percy was laid up with tuberculosis, he read Thomas Mann and other “literature of the alienated self.” He also immersed himself in Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and more philosophers who were mulling over the same kind of existential questions that he was. Among other things, his father and grandfather had committed suicide, and increasingly this legacy preoccupied him.
Riley, the filmmaker, left this comment about Percy and the philosophical novel late last week:
… I would argue that all novels (at least the ones I like to read) are philosophical novels, works of ideas.Here’s Walker Percy’s explanation:
“While it is true that a novel should have an action, it does not suffice for it to be a “good story.” Art tells some home truths about the way things are, the way we are, about the movement or lack of movement of the human heart….So my main assumption is that art is cognitive; that is, it discovers and knows and tells, tells the reader how things are, how we are, in a way that the reader can confirm with as much certitude as a scientist taking a pointer-reading.” For the deconstructionists or literary theorists among us this view of literature may seem dated or quaint. So be it.
A philosophical novel, for me, doesn’t need a “didactic agenda,” and if its ideas overshadow its art, it becomes something else entirely — a textbook, perhaps?
Walker Percy, for instance, wasn’t looking to answer philosophical questions, necessarily, with his novels. Asking the questions was enough.
See, previously: Walker Percy kept his accent, and Percy on bourbon.
NYC public school librarian defends Precious
February 19, 2010 | Comments Off
The formidable Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo) argues, in “Fade to White,” that responses to Precious (trailer above) break down along racial lines, with white viewers applauding its candor, and black viewers infuriated by its offensive, ham-handed stereotypes.
This stratified response is no surprise, he says, because the film intentionally panders to white audiences: “In guilt-free bits of merchandise like ‘Precious,’ white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.”
I haven’t seen the film, and probably won’t, but below Adalena Kavanagh, a New York City public school librarian, offers a thoughtful defense of Precious — or at least of Push, the novel that inspired it. She says that her students, who are mostly African-American and Latino, request it more than any other book.
Ishmael Reed writes, “Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father.’ While this may be Mr. Reed’s experience, his statement runs counter to my own experience with Push, by Sapphire, the book that the movie Precious is based on. I am a teacher and a librarian who has worked in the New York City public school system since 2003. There hasn’t been a more sought-after, talked-about, or frequently-read book among my students than Push. My students are, and have been, predominantly African-American and Latino. The students who demand Push have been predominantly African-American and Latino. These students live in Harlem, Washington Heights, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.
As a librarian, when students demand a book, I am inclined to give it to them. We struggle every day to make literacy important to our students, so when they find something that actually speaks to them we can’t ignore it, or wish it would go away, no matter how controversial it is, or how uncomfortable it makes us feel. To call Precious a stereotype is to believe that readers cannot distinguish between a character’s experience and a racial group’s reality, and that is giving readers and Sapphire very little credit. Read more
Breaking news: The secret history of Cracker Barrel
February 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Last year I wrote a story about the secret history of Cracker Barrel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and, possibly, the Illuminati. I did this for Significant Objects, a project whose goal is see whether a writer can infuse an otherwise worthless object with value through fiction. In so doing, I raised a little (very little) bit of money for Girls Write Now.
Obviously any artificially valuable item needs advertising. Our entire economy rests on that principle, right? So, many thanks to Kathryn Clendinin, a student at Savannah College of Art & Design, who, for a class assignment, created a news ticker campaign for my Cracker Barrel ornament. Click over to see the whole thing. It’s perfect, don’t you think?
Ms. Clendinin, next time you’re in New York, I’d like to buy you a drink and introduce you to my favorite SCAD alum.
On the interconnectedness of stories and ideas
February 11, 2010 | 16 Comments
Iris Murdoch’s novels were deeply informed — if not consciously shaped — by her readings in philosophy. Walker Percy found a theoretical framework for his fiction in Kierkegaard, who also influenced Kafka.
And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.
Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”
Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.
Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….
[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.
I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I notice philosophy or politics creeping too overtly into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it. 1984 too, but it doesn’t hold up as well in my memory). Your comments are welcome.
See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.
On being intimidated by a favorite writer’s work
February 7, 2010 | 26 Comments
I’m focused on my own writing right now, thus the dearth of longer posts, slowdown in reviewing, and trickle of remainders. I feel guilty about it, if that helps.
A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.
About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn. I was, as always, struggling with structure.
“I try to take comfort,” I told Rupert, in email, “in the knowledge that This Party is, what, your eighth or ninth book? Surely I’ll get better.”
He assured me:
[Y]es, you WILL get better. We all get better. I can definitely imagine being on my deathbed & thinking, ‘Oh, not now, please; I was just beginning to GET somewhere…’ Who was it who said that a writer’s biography is not the details of his life, but the story of his style. Nabokov maybe.
Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed with admiration for someone else’s work that I could barely stand to look at my own. I’m guessing the neurosis is a lifelong affliction — and, judging from conversations with friends, it’s a fairly common one.
Joan Didion suffered from an extreme case of awe-inspired paralysis. She told The Paris Review that, while Henry James was as formative as influence on her writing as Hemingway, she could no longer read him at all.
He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.
Can you imagine? The formidable Joan Didion, reduced to silence by her love of someone else’s words?
For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.
But see Dani Shapiro’s reaction, in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, to an acquaintance who said, “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
If you can relate — or if you can’t — I’m curious about your experiences and I’ve opened up comments.
Unfortunate vestige of being raised Charismatic
February 1, 2010 | Comments Off
Every time I pass this Carnegie Hall ad campaign, I think these happy people are praising God at an Oral Roberts revival.
Earbrass, LTD: Writers in search of reassignment?*
January 26, 2010 | 41 Comments
“First, try to be something, anything, else.” That’s the famous first line of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” and it’s funny because it’s true. Many writers do consider another path initially.
Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor and Larry Brown a fireman. Faulkner did guv’ment work.
Jonathan Lethem once worked as a bookseller; if he weren’t a writer, he says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)
Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I keep saying we’re going to start up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)
Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)
I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this kind of service in a recession, though.
How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?
I’m genuinely curious and opening up comments. Anecdotes about favorite authors are welcome.
* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.
Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop
January 25, 2010 | Comments Off
“My mother spoke to me once after she was dead.” That’s the first sentence of Rupert Thomson’s forthcoming memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, which I started reading last night and am loving and rationing. (I’m in lockdown at my sister’s place, getting some writing done; also, I’ve waited a long time for this book and don’t want to tear through it too quickly.)
The full first chapter is online at Granta, and Rupert reads a later section above. Unless you’re new to this site, you probably know that he’s one of my favorite writers — and, now, a friend.
Making your brain (and fingers) keep going
January 17, 2010 | Comments Off
A friend who just finished writing a(n excellent) book in a short period of time says you have to ignore your brain when it tells you it’s done for the day. You may think you can’t keep going, but if you push on, what comes out will be even better. The next day, do the same. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Also, no socializing. Apart from whatever job pays the bills, do nothing but sleep, eat, procrastinate, and write.
See also Peter Straub’s Twitter bio: “my profession obliges me to enjoy solitary confinement.”
Haitian (and U.S.) history: A 60-second tutorial
January 14, 2010 | Comments Off
On Rachel Maddow’s show, the Haitian Ambassador responds (above) to Pat Robertson’s revolting and infuriating, but not especially surprising, claim that the earthquake is a result of slaves’ “pact with the devil.” As Alex Balk says, this rebuttal is “direct, intelligent,” and “filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening.”
As you’ve no doubt heard, aid agencies are really struggling. Writer Edwidge Danticat spoke with CNN yesterday about the implications of the disaster.
It is a catastrophe beyond measure, because even when we’ve had mudslides or floods, it has overwhelmed the capacity of the country to handle it: to absorb the wounded, to help people find medical care. But this situation is something far beyond anything the country has ever experienced before.In Haiti, most people cannot afford basic medical care, so imagine now, the primary hospital in Port-au-Prince is said to have been severely damaged. It’s truly an extraordinary catastrophe for a country that’s already suffered so very, very much.
The sad thing is that the country seemed to have been on an upswing. There was the beginning of some tranquility.
Earlier Danticat said she could see “parts of my old neighborhood through this very large veil of fire.” (Via A.N. Devers and Joy Press.)
Give what you can. Doctors Without Borders is on the ground and working already, but lacking shelter and basic supplies like anesthesia, so that organization is a good place to start.
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