The Dish – Page 113

You’ve Got Mailer

William H. Pritchard offers the context for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, a newly published volume of the writer’s correspondence that stretches to nearly 900 pages:

Mailer wrote some 45,000 letters, and this selection amounts to less than 2 percent of the whole. For comparative epistolary output from other 20th-century writers, Lennon notes that Willa Cather wrote 2,700, Elizabeth Bishop a few thousand, Hemingway 10,000. When Lennon began work on the project in 2002, he figured it would take a few years; he was soon overwhelmed. By way of accounting for such an extraordinary output, Gay Talese observes that no writer of Mailer’s generation was more accessible: He wrote, by a rough count, to 4,000 individuals, and his typical letter is long rather than short. If letters piled up while he was at work on a book (which was always), then he would answer them in gusts of whirlwind energy. It’s safe to guess that most of those who wrote to Mailer got back at least as much as they put out.

Richard Brody points to one of the persistent themes of Mailer’s letters – the way he measured himself “on the yardstick of the Great American Novel”:

He harbored the thought that his 1965 novel “An American Dream” was “probably the first novel to come along since ‘The Sun Also Rises’ which has anything really new in it.” In 1971, he wrote that “it’s necessary to reestablish the right of the novel to exist in these profoundly unnovelistic times”; that “in a sense one has to invent the idea of the novel all over again”; and that “anyway I’m sick to death of my special brand of journalism.” But he had to keep going, to support his family and to pay back taxes—and he also was uncertain about the novel as a genre, as he wrote, to [J. Michael] Lennon, in 1972:

I have come to a place where I think it is almost impossible to go on with a novel unless one can transcend the domination of actual events—invariably more extraordinary and interesting than fiction. So if this new novel is good enough, it may serve to underline how hard it is to write a novel today and how journalism when it becomes an existential species of non-fiction can generally be superior to the novel, superior even on metaphysical grounds—but this last I don’t dare go near.

The novel in question, which took Mailer ten years to write, was “Ancient Evenings.” In 1975, he wrote to the film director Peter Bogdanovich, “I am set to write the great American novel but keep finding ways to tackle myself on the two-yard line.”

And Dwight Garner notices a particularly compelling letter about the sources of certain writers’ greatness:

In a 1960 letter to Diana Trilling, he argued that many great writers are thus because of their built-in limitations, the way they are hobbled. “Faulkner writes his long sentence because he never really touches what he is about to say and so keeps chasing it; Hemingway writes short because he strangles in a dependent clause; Steinbeck digs into the earth because characters who hold martini glasses make him sweat; Proust spins his wrappings because” a gay man “gets slapped if he says what he thinks.”

Read one of the letters in the volume, from Mailer to Henry Miller, here.

Vandalism As Literature

Emily Gowers is captivated by Kristina Milnor’s Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii:

Milnor reads the graffiti as carefully as any literary text, picking out clever manipulations of lines from Ovid and Virgil and the rhymes hidden in abbreviations that speak of subtle play on the aural and read experience of words. She also takes account of the original location of graffiti, which was often placed so as to initiate a dialogue with adjacent visual images. Along with crudity, she finds delicate sequences of erotic poems and even – wishful thinking, perhaps – Rome’s only personal declaration of lesbian desire. Her project fits well with other recent explorations of the fuzzy areas at the margins of canonical Latin literature: paratexts, pseudepigrapha (fakes ascribed to famous authors) and centos. In her view, one reason graffiti should intrigue us is because it shows how permeable the borders were between elite and popular culture. Street songs influenced higher genres; conversely, letter-writing etiquette and the metrical conventions of epic, drama and elegy were widely known among ordinary scribblers.

(Photo of Pompeiian graffiti via Wikimedia Commons)

A Story About Surviving Death Row

Damien Echols, who received three death sentences as part of the West Memphis Three, shares his struggle to have a life after being tortured – and almost killed – for a crime he didn’t commit:

Echols’ memoir about his experience is here. Previous live storytelling on the Dish here. Learn more about The Moth here.

A Short Story For Saturday

This week’s short story, Kafka’s “The Bridge,” is very short indeed – but that just means you should read it more than once, really pondering what the strange tale might mean. Here’s how it begins:

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the other, I had clamped myself fast into the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not yet traced on any map. So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once spanned, can cease to be a bridge.

Read the rest here. The story also can be found in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Check out all our previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

In Defense Of Confessional Poetry

Nadia Colburn makes the case:

The themes of the domestic, of sexuality, and of mental health are labeled “confessional,” perhaps, because they are considered “not quite honorable.” After all, one goes to Catholic confession to confess one’s “sins.” But I fear that sometimes the threat of the term “confessional” prevents people from staying on the path of their own truths, a path of self discovery and ultimately potentially of a spiritual awakening that asks us to move beyond these notions of “manliness” or womanliness, or other categories. After all, the “confessional” is a religious practice that assumes that in expressing one’s problems, one can ultimately let them go and move beyond them to get closer to God.

In a recent piece called “Confessional Writing Is Not Self-indulgent,” the essayist Leslie Jamison discusses the ways in which personal writing connects people through self-recognition. Even beyond that, though, removing masks is an important task of poetry, and of all writing, because it is often exactly through revealing the personal that we are able to transcend the rigid boundaries of self and the categories around it, and to connect with others outside ourselves, both on a political and a spiritual level. Those themes that are considered “personal” are important to us all — not only in our private lives — but also in our public, communal lives. And the people who write about them, even in our age of Oprah, continue to be pioneers.

Face Of The Day

Lori Dorn captions:

Artist Phil Ferguson aka Chili Philly has combined his love for food, particularly for burgers and breakfast, with his incredible talent for crocheting and translated it into amusing and amazing headwear. Chili Philly describes himself as “Boy, living in Melbourne, making burgers and crocheting”. The full line of Chili Philly’s hats can be found via his Instagram and Facebook pages.

Putting A Novelist In Your Novel

Joanna Scutts ponders the rise of fiction based on the lives of writers :

If the biographer won’t speculate exactly how it felt to have sex with F. Scott Fitzgerald, fiction writers are happy to step in and describe it. In the past few years, a flood of what amounts to biographical fan fiction has swept conventional literary biography out of the way. The success of Nancy Horan’s 2007 novel Loving Frank, about the private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by Paula McLain’s 2011 hit The Paris Wife, told from the point of view of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, has made publishers eager for stories that draw heavily on biography but wriggle out of its ethical constraints. Zelda Fitzgerald, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, all the other Hemingway wives, all Wright’s other women, Sigmund Freud’s lover Minna Bernays—these real women have no defense against being shoehorned into romances that presume to tell us what we secretly want to know about famous people. This month sees the publication of Vanessa and Her Sister, a novel constructed as the fictional diary of Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s sister. In her author’s note, novelist Priya Parmar regrets that she almost has too much truth to work with: “It is not easy to fictionalize the Bloomsbury Group, as their lives are so well documented.”

They therefore leave little space for “invention,” which perhaps invites the question as to what invention gains, beyond allowing a character to voice thoughts like “Who knew I would like sex as much as I do?” As Parmar also tells us, Vanessa Bell never kept a diary in which she recorded a liking for sex or anything else. Is there something in that silence we ought to respect?

A Poem For Saturday

From Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn:

I am not a poet but reading certain poems gives me a feeling which I like to believe tells me something of what it might feel like to be a poet, one who makes the compositions that bear that sacred name. That’s how I feel when I read the work of Mary Ruefle. Her poems are sweetly mysterious and captivating, with a decisive momentum like tobaggans swiftly barreling to their last lines—sometimes holding on for dear life, sometimes fairly squealing with abandon. And thus my love of tobogganing has been restored to me.

Mary read at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City this week with Christian Wiman, another illustrious contemporary poet, chief editor of Poetry Magazine from 2003-2013 and currently on the faculty at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

We plan on posting poems by Christian Wiman soon in the new year, and this week we’ll feature three of Mary’s. Others of hers from The Dish can be found here, here, and here, all from the same book from which these three are drawn, Trances of the Blast, published by Wave Books in 2013.

“Platonic” by Mary Ruefle:

Did it mean anything? The stone, the rose,
darkness, wood, wind, flame, the violin.
The practical man, the visible world,
the painted ponies, the sea, the wilderness
of cellophane, my last word, my crumpled message
to my friend? Was I in search of something,
tools maybe, or seeds, for many odd things
are stowed under the overthinking.
Let’s begin to talk about things,
and what they should be named,
and whether it will be necessary
to draw any of them.
The sound of the teakettle—
it was the most terrible thing in the world.
Sometimes it was a wolf, and sometimes
a man or a woman, whatever it felt like,
even falling cherry blossoms, and always
it could take you out, and then it did,
leaving the whole room as impressive
as an unexplored cave.

The Perils Of Playwriting

Alena Smith considers them:

In his 2009 study Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, Todd London, artistic director of the playwrights’ advocacy organization New Dramatists, reaches a bleak conclusion: “Financially speaking, there is no way to view playwriting as anything other than a profession without an economic base.”

Data collected in London’s book, culled from the top tier of American playwrights (those who “have gone to leading schools, gained entrance to competitive playwright centers, had productions on major stages, and won prestigious awards”), and who on average are between 35 and 44 years old, shows that only 15 percent of playwrights’ incomes actually come from writing plays. So, if a playwright makes $30,000 a year, that means their actual playwriting (including commissions, productions, and publications) garnered them just $4,500. And this level of income is typical for the writers surveyed: as London reports, “The average playwright earns between $25,000 and $39,000 annually, with approximately 62% earning under $40,000 and nearly a third making less than $25,000.” …

In 21st-century America, playwriting cannot be thought of in earnest as a rival of screenwriting. In reality, it is more like a barnacle clinging to it. If not for the fact that so many writers can and do earn an actual living in Hollywood, and thereby subsidize their occasional foray into the theater, many of the plays written since, oh, the advent of the talkies, let’s say, would never have existed.