A few years ago, an editor at The Oxford American telephoned to request that I write a piece for that journal about the Calder Willingham-Fred Chappell feud. I struggled to recall the brief episode wherein I corresponded with that screenwriter (The Graduate) and pop novelist (Eternal Fire) about some obscure detail. By an equally obscure complication,...
Most writers feel honored by literary prizes—in the way I feel so honored by the award of the T.S. Eliot prize—whether they accept them or not. At the same time, many writers share the wish that their vocation could be carried on anonymously. By the time they have become suitably proficient at their art and...
The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin’s entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Baldwin’s purpose is not to piggyback a Grand Master. He desires to remind us of...
With the deaths of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy the specter of the star system is loose again in the land. “Who will be their successors? Who will pick up their mantle?” It’s a plaintive cry, predictable but genuine, largely journalistic and academic—a spume from the wave of canon-making—thinned by its basis in literary...
“Even one verse alone sometimes makes a perfect poem.” —Ben Jonson It was Donald Hall who gave us that useful and precise critical term “McPoem” to describe the garden variety contemporary poem in flabby free verse whose dismal ambitions are set to a spavined music. Hall is a savvy and perspicacious critic, and the bloke...
Madison Smartt Bell has a penchant for keeping his fiction mysterious at its deepest core. The protagonist of his 1985 novel, Waiting for the End of the World, is a fellow called Larkin who is out to destroy New York City for no reason a reader can ever discern. The willful wackos who give The...
Ordinary people, we are told, ordinarily speak in cliches, bromides, and dotty banalities, and it is the task of the literary artist, of the playwright in particular, to give them expressive and convincing words. This is the practice of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard. The success of heightened language upon the...
She was a handsome woman, Raylene Thomason, not what you’d call beautiful, but with Cherokee blood that gave her a broad pleasant face with a clean jawline and steady dark eyes. She took her looks so much for granted that it seemed she paid no attention, and maybe she didn’t. Her appearance was useful for...
“Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” —Oscar Wilde Louis Simpson stands as an easy example of the poet divided, whose best talents and strongest predilections are at odds with one another. He takes Walt Whitman as spiritual father and his relationship with...
“Amazed at the moment’s peak, flesh became word—and the word fell.” —Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert music. Broad prairies of cadenza enclose a garden patch of melodic theme, an orotund thunder of...
Susan had set up the ironing board in the kitchen and upended the iron there while she sprinkled her blouse. I could not detect the heat waves rising from the face of the iron, but the morning sun showed them clearly on the refrigerator door, curling and uncurling in hypnotic arabesque. That became my image...
“Shall they hoist me up and show me to the shouting varletry of censuring Rome?” —William Shakespeare The true facts of the case will lie hidden in time forever. For our purpose here, we can accept the official version; that the emperor Augustus in the year 8 A.D. exiled the poet Ovid to Tomis, a...
“A poet in our times is a semi- barbarian in a civilized community.” —Thomas Love Peacock Something happened. The juice went out of it, the largest joy. There may arise figures analogous to Emily Dickinson, or even to John Clare, but no experienced lover of poetry expects a new Keats or a new Shelley or...
Surprisingly often we talked about Vergil, usually about the Aeneid, but sometimes about the Georgics, and then with the wry sentimental fondness of old students who had been made, not quite willingly, to go to school to the poem. And during the plentiful longueurs of the Redskin games of the mid-1960’s, we would regret that...
“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the...
“Eldorado banal de tous les vieux gargons.” —Charles Baudelaire The last sentence in Russell Banks’s magnificent novel is surprising in its inevitability: “Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.” Here is a sentence to conclude a politically radical novel, a story of socially revolutionary purpose. But there is no hint in...
“It is a hard task to treat what is common in a way of your own.” -Horace Jill McCorkle: The Cheer Leader; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $15.95. Jill McCorkle: July 7th; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $17.95. Louis Rubin is easily the most respected and celebrated scholar of modern Southern literature, but it will never be said...
Thrice-rendered Enderby slenderly lives again. In the 1974 novel, The Clockwork Testament, Anthony Burgess dispatched to eternity his gross, grotty, gastric poet; New York City slaughtered the luckless English bard with a heart attack. But here he is again in Enderby’s Dark Lady. “I think we have to look at it this way,” Burgess says. “All fictional events...