The Making of The Wind in the Willows

This volume, published by the Bodleian Library of Oxford University (and showcasing some of their holdings of Kenneth Grahame's manuscripts), is a very attractive and nicely illustrated account of the origins and publication of Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows. There isn't much more to say about it, just that if you like this kind of book (as I do), this one is well-done and engaging.

Le Guin's Last Words

Ursula K. Le Guin corrected the proofs of this small book just one week before her death in January 2018 at the age of 88.  It is called Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing.  It began as conversations with David Naimon at a small community radio station in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin lived.  The book version of these conversations is divided into three main sections:  "On Fiction," "On Poetry," and "On Nonfiction."

All three parts are interesting, though the one on poetry is on a foreign ground for me.  Nothing seems out of place if you have read Le Guin's nonfiction, particularly her recent collection Words Are My Matter (2016), which is referenced often in section three. 

All in all this is a pleasant coda to a long and distinguished career. 

The World Turned Upside-Down

The first words I read by Junot Diaz were his supposed confession of having been raped as a child, published in the April 16, 2018 issue of The New Yorker.  All the Holden Caulfield bells went off in my mind:  Phoney!  Sexual assault is charge to be taken seriously, but in this case it seemed that Diaz was making a generic and contrived complaint, one that just didn't (for me) ring true. Soon afterwards some charges against Diaz himself of sexual abuse surfaced, which made his "confession" seem even more like a calculated pre-emptive strike for sympathy.  Be that as it may, I thought I'd give one of his books a read, and by most accounts the book to read was his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Well I'm now completely baffled as to why this book won any award at all.  It's a poorly written account of the sad (and not short enough) life of a Dominican geek in New Jersey, with the author sneering at his characters all of the time.  If something as repulsive as  MTV's Jersey Shore had been based on a novel, then the novel would share a kinship with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 

After struggling to get through Diaz's book, what a great pleasure to read The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things (2018), a short story collection by British writer Mark Valentine.  It contains twelve stories, all originally published in small press sources between 2013 and 2017, plus a section "Notes on the Border" comprising some diary entries from 2001 through 2003.  There is more talent and artistry in a few pages of Valentine's prose than could be found in an entire novel by Diaz.  The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things was published in a limited edition of 199 numbered copies. Why is there such a disparity, and one in the wrong direction, between the receptions of Diaz and Valentine? Valentine is a literary writer, while Diaz is schlockmeister of the tee-vee generation.  It's a sad world that Diaz is acclaimed while Valentine is read only by the cognioscenti.

Strike One, Strike Two . . .

Some books just don't click with particular readers, for various (often personal) reasons.  Two books encountered in succession struck me this way.

First was The Forever War (1974), by Joe Haldeman. Yes, it's a patently obvious contemplation of the Vietnam war, stretched across space.  Yes, it won the Nebula Award in 1975, and the Hugo Award in 1976. And it's well written, but I just found it hard slogging, with themes that do not much interest me, and characters with attitudes that (to me) belong to out past not to our future.

Next came The Gates of Paradise (1960) by George Andrzeyevski.  It was translated from the Polish in 1962 by James Kirkup.  I'd seen the 1968 film of the novel, and found it to be an interesting if exasperating mess, gradually revealing the flaws behind the people who were involved in a religious quest in medieval France. So I thought that perhaps the original source might be better. Alas, it's not, and the film at least has the benefit of eye candy, something lacking in the book.  In fact the book is one of those pointless attempts at being avant garde. Its contrivance is that the entire novel is one long run-on sentence (with a second five word sentence as the final line). The contrivance palls very quickly and it is a struggle with little reward to keep reading on, and on, and on.

Vidal, of Course

Gore Vidal (1925-2012) wrote novels, essays, plays, screenplays, etc.; he was an all-about man-of-letters, with a polished style and a quick wit.  Of all his writings, I find his essays to be of the most consistent high quality.  This volume, Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking (1999), edited by Donald Weise, collects Vidal's writings on sex, mostly on same-sex relations.  Vidal had some interesting attitudes.  Though he spent some five decades with a male partner, he shunned the term "gay" and "homosexual" (as a noun).  He was perfectly open about his relations with men, but he would say there are homosexual acts but not homosexuals, even as many others accepted the term "gay" or "homosexual" as a badge of honor. 

This book contains fourteen essays, and three long interviews. The standout essays are "Sex Is Politics" and "The Birds and the Bees", but Vidal is also very acute in writing about people he knew, from Eleanor Roosevelt, to Tennessee Williams and W. Somerset Maugham.  The interviews are somewhat lesser.  Vidal is at his best in writing prose.

A few of Vidal's stray statements on modern culture strike me as worth repeating for their self-evident truths:

"If I were dictator or president or otherwise in control of a well-run country . . . I would not allow any religious group to have schools. And without schools, there would be no Catholic Church in two generations because their doctrines are so insane that nobody in his right mind would accept them.  Then I would tax all churches heavily. That would reduce their influence by 90 percent." (p. 238)

"I don’t think Western Civilization as I’ve understood it and cared for it will continue. I don’t really in my mind’s eye see the human race in existence for another hundred years, right or wrong. When you feel like this, it makes it very difficult to create a work of art because I think the principal impulse to create is the will to make something permanent, even though you know that from the stand-point of eternity, nothing is permanent. But certainly in terms of the generations of man, as the Bible would put it, you do have a sense of continuing and addressing future generations. And so you will not become entirely extinct because of what you have wrought. Well, if you don’t have that sense or if you are fairly convinced that there is going to be no future either for the written word as you practice it or for the human race as such, well, this sort of takes the moxie out of you. And I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this.  I think that the deterioration in all the arts that we are now seeing is a sign of this." (p. 250)

The Seventh Ogre

Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981) was primarily an artist of the weird.  Early in his career, he adapted and illustrated an East Indian folk tale as his first book, The Seventh Ogre (1932).  The story tells of a blind man and a deaf man who team up and have a number of adventures, including while scheming to steal the gold of an ogre, who calls upon six other ogres to help him (unsuccessfully) defend his gold.  While Coye's macabre illustrations are interesting and well-done, they don't seem a very good match for the tale. Still the combination makes for an interesting little book.

The Secret Lives of Authors

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Writers (2007), edited by Dan Crowe, is a kind of coffee table book about writers and their writing spaces—their desks, their surroundings, their rituals, and their favored desk-top tchotkes.  Basically, the editor wrote to sixty-some-odd writers about their daily work as writers. There are some well-known authors included, but a lot of the names are of less-known, and all of them are decidedly pretentious in a literary way (i.e., genre authors were evidently not asked).

As an exercise, I though the book sounded interesting, but the end-result is considerably less engaging.  One goes from such insights as Lionel Shriver's note that "having the nerve to write yet another book in a world already drowning in blather requires bravery, arrogance, and willful naiveté" to Tim Carvell's "the only way to write is to first spend a considerable amount of time not writing." Well, both statements are true, but it's rather sad that they represent the best this book has to offer.