(posted Thursday, July
30, 1998)
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]; [email protected]
Cc:
Re: Joyce--or,
better, don't
Cher
Maître ,
Saw Wings of the Dove
last evening & was very impressed. So that was what it was all about! Your
writing has no bigger fan than EW, but I must admit to finding some of the
later novels a bit, shall we say, murky . Large & charming party at
the Cineplex Odeon--the young Waldorf Astors, Mr. Balfour, Ld & Lady Elcho,
Dcess of Manchester, Lady Essex, &c. &c. All seemed delighted but for
poor Teddy, who ran screaming from the theater during the first reel--his
nerves, no doubt. Miss Bonham Carter was splendid . She ought to play
Lily Barth if The House of Mirth ever makes it out of turnaround. Is it
true they're giving the Merchant-Ivory treatment to your Golden Bowl ?
Can't say I ever made it quite to the end of that one either.
Have you
looked over the Modern Library list yet? As Scribner authors, neither of us is
likely to find much favor in a list of books sold by Mr. Cerf. Still, I fear
that to the younger generation we must represent the literary equivalent of
tufted furniture and gas chandeliers. Ulysses , alas, is No. 1. Have you
driven into this fog? It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy
kind) & uninformed & unimportant drivel. The ingredients of soup do not
make soup without the cook's intervention. The same goes for Mr. Kerouac.
Your Devoted Edith
******
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]; [email protected]
Cc:
Re: 100
romans
Dearest Edith,
The drab unblinking question
that presents itself is that "compilation" to which you refer, whose arrival,
though unwelcome, is in no way resistible. Of the part that is mine to pass
over in silence is perhaps the course both of humility and of humilité .
That the number of my own works chosen should be trois is a matter for
neither protestation nor ingratitude. Yet that such an ordering hardly induces
in the author of the aforementioned trois such satisfaction as might be
hoped to accrue to one looking down with Olympian detachment from beyond the
vale of longevity is a statement the validity of which cannot be called readily
into question. It is unlikely to fail to play upon the suspicions of such a one
that the composition of his most highly esteemed should be that most lately
converted into a wan cinematic confection of fretsome abbreviation. Neither,
however, could a figure such as he neglect the observation that the personage
with whom the former is now abstractly in conversation was accorded the merit
of only dues livres , and that those due were accorded a position
more terrestrial, which is to say well below those of the former on the "list."
Such a "point," once made, could not resist the tendency to instill feelings of
"envy" and ressentiment on the part of an author perhaps better
compensated and perhaps more "popular," but in the view of the critical
intelligence--if any such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived
as being within our sphere--not really as good as mine. Thus it is an
expression of both discretion and a great humble reverence for the feelings of
others to leave such a "point" unmade and unwinced at.
Though it
may be additionally unpenworthy, there is another "point" that heavily impels
making . It is that of all the volumes, some eminent, some too much
esteemed in the trail of "fashion," there is one included that so transgresses
the hesitational boundary of propriety as to induce a feeling of stammering
dyspepsia. Attention is called to the uncouth Mr. Roth, whose effluviations are
so juvenalianly unspeakable that I cannot bear to utter their "title." This
work , it cannot be refrained from being pointed out, has as its chief
topic that exercise that in our own great palmy day was considered least worthy
of writerly elucidation. That this basely erotic occupation that was to our own
contemporaries so unsupportable should form the core of the work in
question might be thought to constitute a disqualification. To such vulgarian
depths does this "fascination" descend that there is in one place depicted an
act of rank unsalubrious congress between him and a comestible whose
ingestion by familial others is ineluctably and tenebrously foreordained. I
speak here of the "liver" scene. For a work whose "climax" depends on feelings
of the most passionate revulsion to be esteemed ahead of your own labors, so
far superior as to be undeserving of inclusion in the same tormented sentence,
is, my dearest Edith, an insult insufferable to all whose reverence for
literature anglais is to be warranted. To commiserate against so great
and gaping an injustice presents itself as a course of action perhaps less
unwise than others.
Yours faithfully fond,
Henri
******
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Cc:
[email protected]; [email protected]
Re: What did I
win?
Dear Mrs. Wharton,
This is
the first I've heard about a prize. Pardon me for asking, but is there by any
chance some money attached to it? Also, please forgive me for the off-color
stories I told at tea last week. The one about the American couple in the
bordello went a little far, I think. Zelda and I may have had a few too many
before stopping by.
Mirthfully, Scott
Fitzgerald
******
From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Cc:
[email protected]; [email protected]
Re: Listing
slightly
Dear Scott,
I was in Key West when I got
a copy of your message. I have a place down there in Key West. It's a small
place but a good place. There are cats and a lot of rain and when it rains the
cats all come inside the house. The biggest cat is named Hem. There are some
smaller cats, too, with names like "Scott" and "Sherwood" and "Dos." The big
cat is bigger than the others and also braver and probably a better writer. But
some people who don't know any better think the little cats are pretty cute.
One day I'll put them in a bag and drown them in the river for their own
good.
In Florida the cats drink
milk, but we humans all drink rum. It's not very good rum, but in Florida rum
is the drink to drink so we drink it. Sometimes we mix the rum with Coke and
sometimes we don't mix it with anything, depending on how thirsty we are. Rum
and Coke is a good drink, but not if you're thirsty. If you're thirsty, you
want water, but never Rum and Coke. Here's 400 bucks. You can pay me when you
see me, unless I see you first.
Hell, you
were saying something about a list. I couldn't quite make out what you were
saying, but I knew it was about a list. Scott, a list is a fine thing if you're
young, and you're high up on it. But when you're a little older and not so high
up you see that the list is just a list and that's all it is.
Yours always--Ernesto
******
From:
[email protected] To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected];
[email protected] Re:
Dear Ernest,
Apparently man can be cured
of drugs, drink, gambling, biting his nails, and picking his nose, but not of
making lists. I'm not giving it another moment's thought on account of I'm too
busy writing my novels, and if somebody wants to read one of them instead of
sipping a whisky highball and kicking back in an Adirondack chair or an
eight-dollar swivel chair or a pig iron porch swing covered in fifty-cent
Montgomery Ward paint from a paintcan he keeps on a ledge in the fallingdown
barn where his people have been begetting quadroons and octaroons and
sixteentharoons and thirtysecondaroons since the time before they thought to
write it down, that's nobody's business but his own. I've got only one
complaint for you to please pass along to the committee. My handwriting may not
be all handwriting should be, especially after lunch, but even a county court
judge drunk at noon ought to be able to read a title straight. So please tell
those Northern fools it's not Light in August but Fightin August ,
for godsakes.
Let's get
soused again sometime soon,
Yours, Bill
P.S. Mailer is Hemingway
on a tight budget. Styron is Faulkner on no budget at all.
******
From:
[email protected] To: [email protected] Cc:
[email protected] Re: Insult as e-mail; the e-mail as
insult
Mailer had always thought
highly of William Faulkner. Once, when he was younger, he had read Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying cover to cover. Privately, he had found it a bit
confusing. Why was the mother a fish? But he knew that people thought it was a
fine novel, and he resented that he hadn't written it himself. Faulkner was a
Southerner, probably a racist, and hard to understand. Mailer was a Jewish New
Yorker, beloved by black people, and a comparatively easy read (not to mention
a fine lay). Still, Mailer thought, Faulkner and Mailer were a lot alike. Both
were great American writers--between them they had written many of the best 100
novels of the 20 th century. Both drank, heavily at times; liked to
get paid for what they wrote; and had contempt for lesser talents. Mailer
thought Faulkner thought highly of Mailer as well--maybe as highly as Mailer
did himself.
Mailer had sent Faulkner
every book he had ever written, all with flattering inscriptions, and never
received so much as a thank-you. Mailer suspected that Faulkner had read them
all and wished he had written them himself. Possibly, Faulkner had never so
much as looked at them. He had heard somewhere that Faulkner had died. Still,
Mailer was irked. He felt that it had all been a big literary game. Mailer was
not a critic of Southern literature, but he privately wondered whether
posterity might not judge John Jakes a better novelist than Faulkner, sources
close to Mailer tell Mailer.
So to be called Hemingway on
a budget by Faulkner made Mailer angry. It made Mailer very, very angry. So
angry did Mailer become that Mailer took the big picture of Faulkner that hangs
over Mailer's desk and smashed it into a million pieces. After he did that,
there were just pictures of Mailer hanging there. Mailer recognized that this
reaction was not very mature, but Mailer had bigger things to worry about than
minding his literary manners. Mailer didn't understand why people were treating
him like a dead writer, either. Just recently, Mailer had published his
autobiography and a book about Jesus. Mailer had the inspired idea to combine
the two subjects in one book. Bill Faulkner never had an idea that good, or if
he did, no one could understand it.
Mailer
thought to himself that next time he saw Faulkner, he would probably sock him
one in the kisser. No, Mailer thought, the next time he ran into Faulkner at a
swanky literary party, he would return Faulkner's insult with his usual witty
insouciance. Mailer hated those parties, but he hardly ever missed one. "Your
books stink," Mailer imagined himself saying. "Mailer can't understand a word
of them."
******
From:
[email protected] To: [email protected];
[email protected] Cc: [email protected] Re: On the
list
Norm,
Easy on the benzedrine, man.
Me, I was just pleased to be on that list with famouswriters like Paul Bowles
and William Golding. That cat Saul Bellow was on there too. It made me think
about the time Neal and I went to see him in Chicago in 1949.
I came in by Greyhoundbus
from Milwaukee. It was an ordinary Greyhoudbus with runaways and oldfolk and
the Greyhoundbusdriver in his Greyhoundbusdriver's cap not saying much of
anything but just driving the bus toward Chi. Neal didn't have the busfare so
he hotwired a car, not to steal it, but just to ride ride ride for the thrill
of it like some magnificent highflying parkpigeon. Along the way, Neal had
married or maybe just kidnapped a Scandinavian-extracted girl from Kenosha
named Inga. Inga had blond curls and beefy arms like a stevedore and was
excited about seeing the bigcity but said she wanted to go home and was going
to call the police if he didn't take her. Neal should have been worried about
Inga being jailbait but at that point he was pretty focused on medieval
literature, and kept on reciting passages from Chaucer and El Cid and
talking about how Giotto was a better painter than Van Gogh, nokidding.
We were crashing at a cold
water flat on the South side with a guy called Phil and Phil's aunt and her
chihuahuas. The chihuahuas had been shaved real close to the skin, so there
wasn't much to them, just a lot of pointy ears and dogyapping. They must have
been pretty cold in those Chi winters and when they were hungry they'd claw at
your shins. Neal wanted to invite Sanchez and Marylou and Freddie Engels over
for a sexorgy but Dave's aunt was out of chihuahuafood, so before we could do
that, we had to get something for the dogs to eat.
As soon as we stepped outside
Phil's aunt's apartment, a cruiser spotted us and tailed after us at a slow
crawl down the street. Neal had ditched his freebuick, but apparently we looked
like some hipsters who had pulled off a jewelry heist downtown. They didn't
stop us on suspicion, but just kept tailing us at a distance which made us
twitchy since Inga kept saying she was going to turn us in for being hopheads
and whiteslavers and a lot of other stuff I couldn't understand because it was
in Swedish. We knew they were cops because they had copuniforms and were
driving a copcar. So we stopped in a dark dingy old South side tavern to think
over our plans and have some coldbeers.
When we
came out of there, Inga had split and we realized we were on Congress Street.
Congress Street shoots out West for an amazing distance, which is where we were
headed, so we hijacked a lettuce rig, pistol-whipped the driver, wham, and made
straight for Joliet. As we were riding through the sweetsmelling American
night, Neal looked up from the book he was reading, Les aventures de la
dialectique , by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which he had lifted from the
philosophy section of Kroch's & Brentano's in the Loop. He turned to me and
the driver of the rig who was wearing a lettucepicking outfit and a red
bandanna tied around his mouth and said, "Oh man, we completely forgot to go
see Saul Bellow." And now we're all on the same list of goodbooks. I'm
sohappy.
As ever, Jack
******
From:
[email protected] To: [email protected] Cc:
[email protected]; [email protected] Re: Who's
afraid of V W?
My dear Mr Kerouac,
Yes, of course I too am
pleased to be on the list. All these last several decades I have been
overwhelmed with feelings of horror & despair; annihilation; nothingness;
barrenness & void. One could say that I have been in a poor mood. For To
the Lighthouse to place fifteenth provides a moment of cheer, for it proves
that someone has indeed read to the end of it.
But a moment of cheer quickly
passes. What after all is a list? A hundred books; perhaps seventy-five;
perhaps only fifty. The end of each arrives, and soon another book is
published, a book is reviewed, more books appear. List succeeds list. Lists
turn into libraries. Some of these books are borrowed from the libraries. These
books seethe with plots; with characters; with life & suspense. In other
books, little occurs. A group of persons goes somewhere; or does not go
somewhere; or contemplates going somewhere but delays the decision about
whether to go. The words fly past; two hundred words; six hundred words; one
thousand five hundred words; two thousand words. The words turn into pages: one
hundred pages; two hundred pages; three hundred pages; four hundred pages. The
alphabet is recounted. B follows A. D is preceded by C; then comes E; then F;
then G; then H; then I. If L could be reached, that would be something. But L
is very hard to attain; very few people in the whole of England ever attain L.
Not many even get so far as K. And what of M, and the murky letters which
follow M, which include U, R and W? Who can even speak of W, which shimmers at
the North end of the alphabet, scarcely visible from D. When I think of D, an
image comes into my head that I am powerless to resist: it is the cross section
of a mackerel.
Please
forgive my digression--what else can one call it, except perhaps
"maundering"--which has made me forget entirely what I had been about to tell
you! It is nothing of importance! Perhaps something about Vanessa; or Lytton;
or Vita; or Lady Ottoline; or Maynard, who as I write pursues Duncan around the
garden with lust in his heart & a croquet mallet. Such gossip pales beside
this "maundering," this reverie for which I am intensely thankful; for nothing
so solaces me, calms me in the perplexity of life, and miraculously raises its
burdens, as this sublime power, this divine talent for writing endlessly about
hardly anything at all, & one should no more interrupt it, while it lasts
than one should break the crockery in one's home and leave the shards lying on
the kitchen floor for no reason. Though yes, I have done that at times as
well.
Write if you
find work, V
