A WRITER'S WIT By the very nature of his art, which depends on invention and innovation, a story teller must depart from the beaten track and, having done so, occasionally startle and disagree with some of his associates. Healthy disagreement we must have. Preston Sturges Born August 29, 1898

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Peter Van Agtmael | Magnum

A WRITER'S WIT If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. Dorothy Parker Born August 22, 1893

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Robert Fresson

A WRITER'S WIT I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing. Etgar Keret Born August 20, 1967

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the eighteenth in a series of twenty-four.

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart. Sue Monk Kidd Born August 12, 1948

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the sixteenth in a series of twenty-four.

My Book World

“[Don] seems to be having constant attacks of my age-old complaint, spasm of the vagus nerve—at least I hope that’s all it is” (24). [health]
        
“On the 29th, I finished revising ‘Waldemar’ and sent it off right away to Edward [Upward]. It isn’t perfectly all right yet, but it’s as good as I can get it until I have the whole book and can go through it relating all the parts to each other” (30). [writing]
 
“Well, I can’t help that. It [Down There on a Visit] certainly has its faults. Parts of it—particularly ‘Paul’—are still sloppily written and I must tighten them up before they go to press. But I feel confident that the whole thing does add up to something, and that it has an authenticity of direct experience and is altogether superior to the slickness and know-how and inner falsity of World in the Evening. If people don’t like it, I am sincerely sorry; but already I feel in my bones that I shall never repudiate it or have to apologize for it. So we’ll see” (66). [writing]
 
“Then Chester Kallman will be coming and we finally approach the talks about the Berlin musical [Cabaret]. I have a feeling these will end badly. Especially as I don’t really like Chester, and as I feel the terms they are proposing are not fair to me: they want us to split three ways, while I feel that I should have something extra as the original author” (72). [writing]
 
“A story told me by Michael Barrie: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin go out to play golf. The Blessed Virgin is at the top of her form, drives and lands on the green. Jesus slices and lands in the bushes. A squirrel picks up the ball and runs off with it. A dog grab the squirrel, which still holds the ball in its mouth. An eagle swoops down, picks up the dog, squirrel and ball, and soars into the air. Out of a clear sky, lightning strikes the eagle, which drops the dog which drops the squirrel which drops the ball, right into the hole. The Blessed Virgin throws down her driver and exclaims indignantly, ‘Look, are you going to play golf or just fuck around?’” [joke]
 
“ . . . and a description of how the ‘reassuring’ type of writer takes you by the hand and leads you step by step from a familiar into an unfamiliar situation. (Cf. Hemingway, leading you into a game hunt or a battle; and, if he’s in a place you don’t know, he tries to persuade you that you do know it—‘You know how it there early in the morning in Havana, etc.)’” (181). [writing]
 
“Sure, I am prejudiced, but I feel always more strongly how ignoble marriage usually is. How it drags down and shackles and degrades a young man like Henri, who is really sweet and bright and full of quiet but powerful passion. The squalid little shop, the little business premises, you have to open, and the deadly social pattern which is then imposed on  you—of dragging some dowdy little frump of a woman all around with you, wherever you go, for the next forty years. Not to mention the kids. It is a miserable compromise for the man, and he is apt to punish the woman for having blackmailed him into it” (188). [marriage]
 
Have just finished Mrs. Dalloway. It is a marvellous book[.] Woolf’s use of the reverie is quite different from Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Beside her, Joyce seems tricky and vulgar and cheap, as she herself thought. Woolf’s kind of reverie is less ‘realistic’ but far more convincing and moving. It can convey tremendous and varied emotion. Joyce’s emotional range is very small” (219). [literature]
 
“Yesterday I reread my novel, the fifty-six pages I’ve written so far. I am discouraged; very little seems to be emerging. Maybe I really have to sit down and plot a bit before I go on. I do not have a plot and I don’t even know what I want to write a novel about . . . . No, that’s not quite true. I want to write about middle age, and being an alien. And about the Young. And about this woman. The trouble is, I really cannot write entirely by ear; I must do some thinking” (221). [preliminary discussion of his writing of A Single Man, which originally features a woman]
 
“Since it was no good my sitting with Charles, I had time on my hands and so I drove up to the Griffith Park Observatory to watch the sun set. Astonishing, how empty and wild the hills still seem. As I stood there I felt, as I have felt so often, why don’t I spend more time in awareness, instead of stewing in this daze? How precious these last years ought to be to me, and how I ought to spend them alone—alone inside myself, no matter who is around” (238). [philosophy]
 
“The Stravinskys came to supper on Monday evening, along with the Huxleys. Bob Craft told us that Igor and Vera were quite transformed while in Russia. They were so happy to be speaking the language in which they were really fluent. All their pride in Russia emerged—especially, of course, Igor’s. Igor, like Picasso, is still really a tolerated exception in the arts; the authorities still don’t approve of what either of them stands for. Igor was chiefly pursued by young people, to whom he is an avant-garde champion. But more of all this, I hope, tomorrow night, when we have supper with them, at their house” (250) [friendship]
 
“David Roth has a friend who, when he was being examined by the psychologist at the draft board, was asked, ‘Could you kill a man?’ and answered, ‘Yes, but it would take years’” (389). [humorous anecdote]
 
“Don and I parted discreetly at the car door. As for Gigi, I politely kissed her goodbye on the cheek. Danny took out ten dollars’ worth of life insurance (which pays off three hundred thousand, I think he said). Danny spread his between his children and Gigi, I guess. So I took out the same amount in favor of Don—just to show Danny that we animals are very bit as valuable as humans” (411). [relationship with Don]
 
“Well, the Cabaret film is on. We stand to win at least ten thousand dollars, for a treatment; then, if that’s accept, ninety thousand for the screenplay; then, if the picture is made, a bonus of twenty-five thousand if we’re the sole credited authors and of ten thousand if we share the credit!” (556). [finance]
 
“Don said at breakfast this morning that he is so happy with me and with our life together now. I feel the same way, but it is so important to remember that what is alive and flexible is also subject to change—change is a sign of emotional health. Therefore all statements and facts of this kind are merely to be recorded as one records the weather. Which doesn’t make it any the less marvellous when the feather is fine!” (459). [relationship with Don]

A WRITER'S WIT I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On Born August 8, 1951

New Yorker Fiction 2016

David Doran

“It wasn’t really so extraordinary that she’d followed him all that way without recognizing him—she’d seen only his back, and the open, flapping coat had obscured his shape, a knitted hat had hidden his hair” (63).

A WRITER'S WIT All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die; And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by. Conrad Aiken Born August 5, 1889

My Book World

EB: “There’s a little Catholic girl named Flannery O’Connor here now [Yaddo], who will remain if she can—a real writer, I think one of the best to be when she is a little older. Very moral (in your sense) and witty—whom I’m sure you’d like” (79).
 
EB: “Good lord—there’s a fifteen year old girl next door whose voice & general personality is just about as restful as a stuck automobile horn” (85).
 
EB: “Marianne [Moore] is wonderful, that’s all. If I don’t mention my health she writes implying that she knows I’m concealing my dying throes from her. If I say I’ve never felt better in my life (God’s truth) she writes ‘Brave Elizabeth!’ (Lota [EB’s longtime companion] says it’s a form of aggression). She used to send one rather stolid, timid friend of ours on Errands of Mercy, to people he’d never met. She told him that ‘poor Peter Monro Jack’ was in desperate straits, sick, lonely, heaven knows what all, and the friend went to call, probably taking a bag of groceries or a bunch of flowers, and found a large gay party going on, with everyone in evening dress” (189).
 
EB: “Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[homas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as “A truck called F———“ (215).
 
RL: “Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct” (92).
 
RL: “I have just finished the Yeats Letters--900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated” (160).
 
RL: “Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then” (225).
 
EB: “so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time” (229).  8/28/57
 
EB: “We actually did go through the Doldrums—a day of them. The water absolutely slick and flat and the flying fish making sprays of long scratches across it, exactly like finger-nail scratches. Aruba is a little hell-like island, very strange. It rarely if ever rains there, and there’s nothing but cactus hedges and prickly trees and goats and one broken-off miniature dead volcano. It’s set in miles of oil slicks and oil rainbows and black gouts of oil suspended in the water, crude oil—and Onassis’ tankers on all sides, flying the flags of Switzerland, Panama, and Liberia” (245).
 
RL: “The man next to me is [in McLean’s, a mental health facility] a Harvard Law professor. One day, he is all happiness, giving the plots of Trollope novels, distinguishing delicately between the philosophies of Holmes and Brandeis, reminiscing wittily about Frankfurter. But on another day, his depression blankets him” (252).
 
RL: “You must read the [Boris] Pasternak Dr. Zhivago, badly translated but dwarfing all other post-war novels except Mann. Everyone says it’s great but too lyrical to be a novel. I feel shaken and haunted by the main character” (267). “bigger perhaps than anything by Turgenev and something that alters both the old Russia and the new for us—alters our own world too.” (271).
 
EB: “When your letter came I was reading Dr. Jivago (Zhivago, in English)—in French. I stopped part way through because the book’s owner wanted it back, and I think I’ll finish it in English. I agree with you completely, I even liked the poems at the end, as much as one could tell about them” (274).
 
RL: “Fred Dupee, and James Baldwin (the colored writer) [sic] and I talked at Brandeis last week. We were each paid $200 and had limp little audiences of about thirty wriggling students. I like Baldwin’s Negro [sic] essays very much—no blarney like [Richard] Wright’s when he isn’t giving a real scene and has to generalize. I am now trying to obliterate my abolitionist pangs before seeing [Jarrell] Randall” (291).
 
RL: “The other night [Allen] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso, and [Peter] Orlovsky came to call on me. As you know, our house, as Lizzie [Hardwick] says, is nothing if not pretentious. Planned to stun people. When they came in, they all took off their wet shoes and tiptoed upstairs. They are phony in a way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent. But in another way, they are pathetic and doomed . . . there was an awful lot of subdued talk about their being friends and lovers, and once Ginsberg and Orlovsky disappeared in unison to the john and reappeared on each other’s shoulders . . . I think they’ll die of TB” (297-8).
 
EB: “Also Ned Rorem wrote me he’d seen you in Buffalo. He’s quite a good song writer, I believe (& he thinks so, too)” (307). Meow!
 
EB: “That Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the “our beautiful old silver” school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V[irginia] Woolf, K[atherine] Anne Porter, [Elizabeth] Bowen, R[ebecca] West, etc.—they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say . . . I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school Southern lady, and suddenly this fact about women’s writing dawned on me, and has haunted me ever since” (333).
 
RL: “there’s just a queer, half-apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing” (381).
 
RL: “I was rather on tiptoe that my poems had been intrusive, and read you letter with great relief. Your suggestions on ‘Water’ might be great improvements. By the way, the mermaid wasn’t your Millay parody, but something in one of your letters, inspired by Wiscasset probably. Glad this and my tampering with ‘In the Village’ didn’t annoy you. When ‘The Scream’ is published I’ll explain, it’s just a footnote to your marvelous story” (405).
 
EB: “Your piece on Frost is awfully nice, Cal [RL’s nickname]. And ‘Buenos Aires’ is certainly The Latin City—I’ll have to go there, I see why you liked it so much. I like the first stanzas best. But I DON’T like the phallic monument, Cal. This has nothing to do with the preceding paragraph—it is just that I think it is unoriginal. It seems to me I’ve read so many ‘Phallic monuments’ in poetry—Spend used to use it ad nauseam, for one. Oh I know it’s the Idea, and Peron, and Power, etc.—it couldn’t be more appropriate. But I feel that you  can surprise us better than that.— I hope you won’t mind my saying this— The first part has so many enlightening images, then I found ‘phallus’ too expected” (448).
 
RL: “The Stone Phallus was meant to be awfully raw and obvious, but maybe the poem ought to end earlier” (455).
 
RL: “What you say about the ‘Union dead’ poem is subtly true, must be a huge hunk of health that has survived and somehow increased through all these breakdown[s], eight or nine, I think, in about fifteen years. Pray god there’ll be no more” (559).
 
EB: “I seem to get to places at just the wrong time—before that I spent four days at the University of Oklahoma. That was really fun; I had a wonderful time—but the desolation of that scenery, at that time of year, is incredible.— I’ve seen ‘lonely New England farmhouses’—but nothing can compare to a lonely, small-sized, ranch-house in Oklahoma. One can see for miles—all pale tan—only the pumping oil-wells lend animation to the scene—even the ‘Wild Life Reservation’—pumping away like lost lunatics—” (741).
 
RL: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of des[cription] and anecdote as now. I was brown haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what. I was largely invisible to myself, and nothing I knew how to look at. But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping. I can’t go on. It is better now only there’s a steel cord stretch[ed] tense at about arms-length above us, and what we look forward to must be accompanied by our less grace and strength. Well, no more dies irae; I wonder if Christians believing in immortality saw their lives as less circular” (776).
 
EB: “However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing!— Never, never was I ‘tall’—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches—now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches— The only time I’ve ever felt all was in Brazil. And I never had ‘long brown hair’ either!” (778).
 
RL: “I still thrill to your visit. After a little, it seemed as if almost thirty years had rolled back, and we were talking, brownhaired, callow and new in New York, Washington or Maine. Voice and image seemed much more what we were than what we are—or is the essence as it was?” (793).