Watching Melville teach himself to write
Herman Melville once declared his Redburn: His First Voyage “trash,” but the novel’s digressions prefigure Moby-Dick, says Ron Silliman.
Herman Melville once declared his Redburn: His First Voyage “trash,” but the novel’s digressions prefigure Moby-Dick, says Ron Silliman.
I doubt I would have been so ticked off at Garrison Keillor’s death-of-publishing op-ed this morning if a friend hadn’t called yesterday to tell me how insulted she was by similar comments he made at a recent Authors Guild gala, but seeing newspapers endorse this sort of twaddle does get tiresome. Judy Berman invited me to elaborate on my Twitter . . .
In what he later called “a rather clever undergraduate essay,” Kingsley Amis argues that Keats was not a great poet, just “an often delightful, if often awkward, decorative [one].”
Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story . . .
Willing Davidson shaped 1900 pages of a late Henry Roth manuscript into the posthumous novel An American Type.