It was E.G. Wodehouse, I think, who once told an anxious would-be writer of fiction that literary success was the result of careful adherence to a few very simple rules. Find a desk, Wodehouse suggested, and stock its drawers with sharp pencils and plenty of paper. Pull up a chair. Then, “Put your bum on...
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Ez and Old VORT
Among Wyndham Lewis’ nearly 50 books are found such classics as Time and Western Man (1927) and the novels Tarr (1918), The Apes of God (1930), and The Revenge For Love (1937). But at the time of his death in 1957, Lewis was probably better known for his persona than for his writings or the...
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Flightless Bird
Many see in Kurt Vonnegut a menace to society. Since the late 1960’s, parents’ groups and school boards in several states have launched drives to keep Slaughterhouse Five and other Vonnegut novels out of libraries and off syllabi. Other observers regard Kurt Vonnegut as a writer of consistent intelligence and integrity—a titan of his age....
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The Lure of Youth
In the early 1920’s, Wyndham Lewis began to discern the makings of a trend. Virtually everywhere he looked—and particularly in novels, newspapers, and magazines—Lewis found writing that retailed the wonders of childishness, precocity, and primitive energy; that implied, too, that life was quite finished at, say, 35. Lewis devotes The Doom of Youth (1932) to...
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Embarrassment of Riches
“Semper inops quicumque cupit” (Whoever yearns is always poor) —Claudian During the 1950’s, an increasing number of middle Americans no longer took seriously the principle that honest work carefully performed is its own true reward. As the exhortative Vance Packard and a host of other social critics noted, these Americans defined themselves not by the...
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Wet Cement
Iain Banks’s first novel invites comparison with the work of Ian McEwan. During the mid-1970’s, McEwan began to establish himself as one of Britain’s most successful writers of fiction. First Love, Last Rites—his first collection of short stories—sold unusually well and won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. The Cement Garden, his first novel, was widely...
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TRUTH in Green Trousers
When the young American poet Ezra Pound arrived in London in the autumn of 1908, he had considerably more on his mind than a tour of Westminster Abbey and a boat ride down the Thames. He was determined to become a noted poet, and—convinced that his own country was little more than a cultural slum—he...
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Academic Anomie & Root-Canal Remedies
“Of skillfully constructed tales . . . there are very few American specimens.” —Edgar Allan Poe During the 1920’s and 30’s, it was possible for a talented young American author to earn a living publishing virtually nothing but short fiction. Scribner’s, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and numerous other widely circulated magazines all aggressively sought fiction...
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Cold Pricklies & Warm Fuzzies
Joyce Carol Oates: Last Days; E. P. Dutton; New York. Joseph Campos-De Metro: The Slugger Heart & Other Stories; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. At 47, Joyce Carol Oates has to her credit more than 40 books, including 16 rather fat novels and nearly as many collections of not-so-short stories. Ms. Oates is also, however, one of this country’s...
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The Mind of a Manichean
In 1980 Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the time he had been living in Berkeley, California, for just over 20 years. But it is safe to say that until Milosz became a Nobel laureate,very few readers of serious literature were on even the most casual terms with his poetry, or with...
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Scandalizing Uncle Ez
Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal. “deferentially. Eliot called him il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman. Pound was a brilliant critic, too. In scores of widely read...
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Red Hot Harlequin Romances
Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by Brian Murray Alice Walker, not yet 40, has been publishing poetry and prose since the late 1960’s. But only in recent years has her work been accorded the sort of fervid critical praise that the American literary establishment prefers to bestow...