A WRITER'S WIT
Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.
--The Pilgrim Hawk
Glenway Wescott
Born April 11, 1901
Boxed In
Grant Cornett April 14, 2014, Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets”: Sam, a Dubliner who has lost his job, takes his dog for a walk and is run into by a cyclist. ¶ Prior to his accident, Sam has thrown a coffee mug at the kitchen wall. He’s angry, not necessarily at his loving wife, Emer, but at his circumstances. It’s like stirring a pot of anger over slights he feels their friends have committed, over not having a job, over Emer’s suggestion that he should volunteer until something turns up. As in all good short stories, the protagonist experiences a change. How does his transformation relate to all that has happened, to the boxed sets of TV dramas like Mad Men and The Wire mentioned so early in the story? Tune in to see! The Guts is Doyle’s latest novel.
Grant Cornett, Photograph
Grant Cornett, Photograph
Wescott at 113
Glenway Wescott is one of those writers who perhaps never received the attention he should have. As deft and nuanced in his writing as E. M. Forster or Christopher Isherwood, also gay writers born about the same time as he, Wescott never quite got the breaks as those two. Because today marks his birthday, I recommend two books, the first one about him, the second by him.
Rosco, Jerry. Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2002.
Rosco makes clear that Glenway Wescott was a writer who wrote because he loved to, not because he felt he should make a living from it. A contemporary of Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Wescott was befriended by most of these people (except for Hemingway who, in a homophobic fit, used Wescott as a model for a character in one of his novels).
Protagonist Alwyn Tower speaking: “Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue” (39).
Rosco makes clear that Glenway Wescott was a writer who wrote because he loved to, not because he felt he should make a living from it. A contemporary of Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Wescott was befriended by most of these people (except for Hemingway who, in a homophobic fit, used Wescott as a model for a character in one of his novels).
Protagonist Alwyn Tower speaking: “Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue” (39).
Wescott, Glenway. The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story. New York: NY Review, 1940. Michael Cunningham, introduction.
Short but piercing novel set entirely in one afternoon in 1940, one that turns out to be quite a charade. A woman “owns” a hawk as a pet, and it sets up obvious symbolism of control, freedom, but also a more subtle symbol for her marriage.
Short but piercing novel set entirely in one afternoon in 1940, one that turns out to be quite a charade. A woman “owns” a hawk as a pet, and it sets up obvious symbolism of control, freedom, but also a more subtle symbol for her marriage.
TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD
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