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Friday 30 December 2011

The Write Advice 005: EDNA O'BRIEN


It’s hard enough to write a book at all; you have to dig and dig and dig into your unconscious, come up with some kind of story, and language, emotion, music… It’s important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one.  The minute you feel you are answerable, you’re throttled.

Interview (Lit Chat, ?1995)

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Irish writer EDNA O'BRIEN (b 1930):

 

https://www.connollycove.com/edna-obrien/


 

 

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The Write Advice 026: GINA BERRIAULT

 
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Friday 23 December 2011

Come Back to Sorrento (1932) by DAWN POWELL



Steerforth Press US edition, c 2000




 

The pity welling in his bright compassionate eyes was so much that it frightened Connie. She had never wanted pity, she only wished to explain. Pity? Surely she was too fortunate a woman to warrant that, she was not lost, and pity was for lost souls. She was so unprepared for the understanding in his eyes that her own eyes blurred unexpectedly and there was an ominous tingling in her head as if old thoughts long stored in the attic were being creakily dragged out for this season's use.


 

 

 

The Novel:  Connie Benjamin, a middle-aged dreamer married to an unromantic German-born shoemaker in the dull Ohio town of Dell River, attempts to escape the banal realities of her humdrum existence by continually reliving her girlhood –– a time when she ‘sang for Morini’ and was praised by everyone who heard her as being the possessor of 'a golden throat.'  

 

Enter Blaine Decker, the town’s new music teacher –– vain, conceited and equally deluded when it comes to admitting that his opportunities to make a name for himself as a serious composer have long since passed him by.  Decker and Connie soon become, along with the frustrated poet Louisa Murrell, a kind of tripartite support group, fueling and encouraging each other’s illusions in a way that is both pitiable and, in time, dangerous.

 

When Connie becomes sick, it suddenly robs Louisa and the condescending Decker of the one thing that, up till then, has given their emotionally stunted lives their only sense of joy or meaning.  Being denied daily access to Connie also means being denied access to the one thing they need to maintain their falsely conceived image of themselves as uniquely gifted if unfairly overlooked artists.  Decker eventually returns to Europe as the paid traveling companion of Dell River’s resident female neurotic, but is left pining for his lost intimacy with Connie and the refuge it offered him from his loneliness and the world’s ongoing indifference to his swiftly vanishing talent. 

 

Come Back to Sorrento was Powell’s fifth novel. It did not sell well when originally published in 1932 (the height of the Depression) or make her popular with the critics, perhaps because her publishers inexplicably insisted on altering its title to The Tenth Moon –– a title Powell herself loathed and described as being ‘empty, silly, pointless’ in her diaries.  But the book has a kind of quiet, poetic dignity that raises the interwoven stories of Connie and Decker from the level of mundane prairie soap opera to that of memorable and affecting modern tragedy.  As Powell herself expressed it, the book is ‘the tragedy of people who once were glamorous, now trying in mediocre situations to modestly refer to their past…’  It is also the work of a very fine writer who was herself unfairly overlooked despite possessing what can only be described as a colossal talent.

 

 

 


DAWN POWELL, c 1930

 

 

 

The Writer:  Dawn Powell was born in Ohio in 1896 and was part of the same generation of American writers which included Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.  She was the friend (and Greenwich Village drinking companion) of Hemingway (they shared an editor for a time in the legendary Maxwell Perkins), EE Cummings, Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Lowry and enjoyed a particularly close friendship with the novelist John Dos Passos, helping to care for him after the 1947 car accident which cost him his left eye and killed his first wife.  She married the poet, critic and future advertising executive Joseph Gousha in 1920 and gave birth to their only child, a son, the following year.  The boy, nicknamed Jojo by his parents, was probably an undiagnosed idiot savant whose violent outbursts required him to be institutionalized for much of his adult life.

 

Powell’s work falls into two distinct categories. The first consists of bittersweet novels focusing on smalltown life — Dance Night (1930), Come Back to Sorrento (1932) and The Locusts Have No King (1948) — that were closely modeled on her own childhood and youth in Ohio as the eldest motherless daughter of a frequently absent traveling salesman father. The second, which began in 1936 with the publication of the witty and moving Turn, Magic Wheel, consists of novels set in the trashy, flashy, often seedy world of contemporary New York (particularly in and around her beloved Greenwich Village). It may have been this refusal on her part to limit herself to writing one kind of novel in one kind of style that explains why her books never sold as well in America as they did in England, where her mixture of compassion, naturalism and screwball-inspired satire consistently seemed to find a more appreciative audience.  In addition to her sixteen published novels, she also wrote dozens of articles and essays for magazines, newspapers and radio as well as nine stage plays and one teleplay before dying of stomach cancer in 1965.

 

Gore Vidal, another friend and admirer of Powell's, once described her as ‘our best comic novelist.’  She probably was, but she was also something far more important than that –– a writer who believed in showing emotionally damaged people as they really were without needing to ridicule, judge or condemn them for clinging to their illusions or indulging their sometimes ludicrous eccentricities.  Her characters are flawed, she wanted to remind us, because being flawed is also an intrinsic part of what it means to be human.
 

 

David Mamet is allegedly writing a screenplay based on Come Back to Sorrento which is scheduled to go into production some time in 2012.  The part of Connie will probably be played by Mamet's wife, the singer and actor Rebecca Pidgeon.  [As of February 2021 the film has still not been produced.]

 

 
 
 
Use the link below to read more about Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 and its companion volume Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962:
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 25 February 2021

 

Friday 16 December 2011

The Write Advice 004: KURT VONNEGUT


I have often wondered what I thought I was doing teaching creative writing, since the demand for creative writers is very small in this vale of tears.  I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration.  The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-a-coalmine theory of the arts.  This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive.  They are supersensitive.  They keel over like canaries in coalmines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) 


 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American writer and artist KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007):

 

https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/kurt-biography/

 
 
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Tuesday 13 December 2011

The Write Advice 003: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE


It’s very hard to concentrateThe head is a muscleYou have to exercise it every day.
 
[Source unspecified]


 
Use the link below to read more about the life and work of controversial French novelist LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE (1894–1961):
 
 
 

 
 
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Monday 12 December 2011

The Position of Peggy Harper (1911) by LEONARD MERRICK


Anthony Blond Ltd UK, 1967



 

It wasn't the girl's fault: she had been a good-natured, unpretentious little Cockney with a warm heart.  It was the fault of the Cabinet Minister, the RA, and the man of letters, of their wives and daughters, and of a press that pandered to an idolatry which it privately condemned: it was the fault, in fine, of the age in which she lived.



 
 
The Novel: The Position of Peggy Harper is an Edwardian novel set in the shabby genteel world of England's theatrical boarding houses and struggling provincial repertory companies.  Its hero, Christopher Tatham, is an aspiring playwright who achieves a minor success with a tawdry little potboiler (from which he earns almost nothing) but continues to dream of writing a serious modern drama in the style of Shaw or Ibsen.  Things look grim for Tatham until he meets the charming and shamelessly self-promoting Peggy Harper –– a pretty young actress of limited ability who will clearly stop at nothing to win the fame she's convinced she is one day 'destined' to find.  Tatham quickly finds himself engaged to Peggy, only to discover as the day chosen for their nuptials approaches that he doesn't really love her and probably never has.  

 
What makes the book unusual for its time is the way Merrick portrays the seedier side of the Edwardian theatrical world –– a world populated by hack writers, drunken actors, pushy stage mothers, unscrupulous managers and penny-pinching landladies –– without making any attempt to glamourize or romanticize it.  This is a world of aspiration and failure, of living in uncomfortable 'digs' where you're forced by lack of money to toast your engagement in unpaid-for ginger beer rather than champagne, of waiting for that ever-elusive 'big break' you probably won't be lucky enough to get.  
 
 
Peggy is a very modern character in the sense that she ruthlessly puts her career first and allows nothing to distract her from pursuing it, taking full advantage of every opportunity to foist her extremely limited talent on an unsophisticated, easily satisfied playgoing public reluctant to look beyond her most obvious physical attributes for any hint of depth or true dramatic ability.  Peggy is alluring and appealing but she's also completely vain and empty, so of course she succeeds beyond her wildest expectations, eventually becoming a star of the theatre and the fiancee of a peer while Tatham, as poor and unsuccessful as ever, finds consolation for the continuing frustration of his artistic ambitions in the arms of her more down-to-earth room-mate. 
 
 
 
 
 

LEONARD MERRICK, c 1920


 
 
 
The Writer:  Leonard Merrick was born Leonard Miller in Belsize Park, London on 21 February 1864 to wealthy Jewish parents.  He was raised in luxury and educated at Brighton College, after which he expected to go to Germany to read law at Heidelberg University.  However, the sudden collapse of his father's business meant that this plan had to be abandoned, forcing him to make his own way in life as best he could from that point onward.  

 
At the age of eighteen he travelled to South Africa with his now bankrupt parents, where he worked as a supervisor in the diamond fields and for a time as a clerk in a local courthouse before almost dying of typhus –– a brush with death that almost certainly hastened his return to England.  Stage-struck from an early age, he talked his way into a position in a provincial repertory company (living and acting in the same down-at-heel environment in which so many, but not all, of his novels are set) before abandoning the stage in 1884 to try his luck as a novelist.  It was also around this time that he changed his surname by deed poll from 'Miller' to 'Merrick' –– the name he had always been known by as an actor.

 
His first novel Mr Bazalgette's Legacy was published in 1888 and was not successful.  Its poor sales forced Merrick to return to the stage and, after borrowing money from a friend, he sailed for New York, where roles for genteel Englishmen proved as difficult to come by as they had been in London.  To keep himself occupied between auditions, he wrote a second novel called Violet Moses for which he was offered $150 by one North American publisher and nothing at all by several others.  Rejecting the $150 even though he was sick and could barely scrape together the money required to pay his passage home, he returned to England where Violet Moses was finally accepted and published, again to little acclaim, in 1891.  A third novel The Man Who Was Good followed in 1892 and sold well enough (but not well enough to permanently ease his straitened financial circumstances) to encourage him to continue writing.
 
 

LEONARD MERRICK, c 1930
 
 
 
In 1894 Merrick married Hope Butler-Wilkins (author of a 1905 novel titled When A Girl's Engaged), fathering a daughter named Lesley who would go on to edit a posthumous 1950 collection of his short fiction titled The Leonard Merrick Omnibus.  Shortly after Lesley's birth the family relocated to Paris –– a city that served as the setting for so much of what Merrick wrote about poets, boulevardiers and others striving to live la vie artistique in its cafés and brasseries.  His friend, the Irish-born/US based author and journalist Frank Harris, described him during his Paris period as 'a small, handsome man, slight but wiry and healthy, with melancholy, dark, brooding eyes, long straight nose, and large black moustache.'  

 
Although he apparently possessed no gift for self-promotion –– a skill every bit as vital to literary success in Victorian and Edwardian times as it is today –– Merrick nevertheless went on to publish nine more novels, five plays and nine volumes of short stories between 1896 and 1930, many of which were reissued in a 1918 Deluxe Edition featuring specially commissioned introductions (a great honour at the time) penned by famous fellow authors of the day including HG Wells, Arthur Pinero, GK Chesterton and William Dean Howells.  Despite being described as a 'writer's writer' by JM Barrie (author of Peter Pan, as portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2004 film Finding Neverland), Merrick's work, which cleverly combined subtly rendered satire with unsentimental honesty, never attained the popularity it deserved during his lifetime.  His wife died in 1917 and Merrick himself died virtually penniless in a London nursing home on 7 August 1939.  He was one of George Orwell's favourite novelists and one of the first to write realistically about showbusiness and its associated pitfalls.  

 
His best novels are generally considered to be Cynthia (1896), The Quaint Companions (1903), Conrad in Quest of his Youth (1903) and The Position of Peggy Harper (1911), although any of his early work (ie. anything he published between 1896 and roughly 1915) is worth reading if you can find it.  This may not be as difficult as it sounds because much of it is available second-hand and is now beginning to be republished online.

 
 
 
 
Use the link below to read a free copy of The Position of Peggy Harper in digital format. 
 
 
 


 

 

The work of LEONARD MERRICK is also being sold in 'new' paperback editions published by Indian print-on-demand companies like BiblioBazaar and the Nabu Press.  Be warned, however, that these are often no more than poor quality digital scans of the Hodder and Stoughton 'Collected Edition' which, at prices ranging from US$25–$35, are frankly not worth the money.

 

 

A biography by WILLIAM BAKER and JEANETTE ROBERTS SHUMAKER titled Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist was published by the Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press in 2009.

 

 

 

 

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The Actor-Manager (1898) by LEONARD MERRICK

 
 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by GEORGE MEREDITH

 

 


 
 
 
 
 
 
Last updated 25 September 2022
 
 
 

Sunday 11 December 2011

The Write Advice 002: WILLA CATHER


The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced.  It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.  One can catalogue all the qualities that he shares with other writers, but the thing that is his very own, his timbre, this cannot be defined or explained any more than the quality of a beautiful speaking voice can. 

Katherine Mansfield (1925)


 
Use the link below to visit the WILLA CATHER page at the PBS Television 'American Masters' website:
 
 
 
 
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Friday 2 December 2011

The Write Advice 001: FORD MADOX FORD


We just thought simply of the reader.  Would this passage grip him?  If not it must go.  Will this word make him pause and so slow down the story?   If there is any danger of that, away with it.  That is all that is meant by the dangerous word technique.

Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924)
 



 

Use the link below to visit THE FORD MADOX FORD SOCIETY, an international organization founded in 1997 'to promote knowledge of and interest in the life and works of Ford Madox Ford':


 

http://www.fordmadoxfordsociety.org/



 

 

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The Write Advice 010: FORD MADOX FORD

 
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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by JOSEPH CONRAD