I get a little caught up in having to say something when posting something here--what Calvin Trillin, in his recent NYer piece on his limited cookery, called the "value added"--which keeps me from sharing things I like. I guess that's what Twitter is for now, the sharing without the value added, and that's what I use it for, but tweets float off into the ether, plus it gets quiet around here when I can't think of a value to add. So here are two things I liked this weekend that I don't have much extra to say about. Both of them, not coincidentally, appeared in the LA Review of Books.
First, something I read just now, although it's been online since Thanksgiving, which is more or less forever. It's the sixth installment of the LARoB's Writers on Teachers series--I think I'm going to read the rest of them, but not tonight because I have to write the rest of this and then fold laundry while I watch yesterday morning's UNC-Kentucky game [ed. note from the next morning: Wow, those kids can play!]--called "My Dinner with Marianne," by Jeffrey Kindley. I don't know as much about Marianne Moore as I should (I feel like I've heard the anecdote about her making up fanciful car names for Ford like the "Utopian Turtletop" as many times as I've heard all other stories about her combined), but I'm getting the feeling it must have been hard not to write a good profile of Miss Moore, who provides such great copy (I can see her style infecting this very post). But Kindley, about whom I knew nothing and still don't know much, does even better than that in writing about the time the great lady invited him to come down from his Columbia dorm for cocoa and dinner in Fort Greene. An excellent paragraph:
The “certain items” to be ordered as our appetizer were, alas, cherrystone clams. I had never eaten a clam in my life, and the prospect of sliding one down my throat made my gorge rise. But here I was in Brooklyn, in a restaurant with Marianne Moore. I was determined not to throw up.
Meanwhile, the reason I was on the LARoB site in the first place was a piece I read yesterday, by the novelist Glen David Gold. It's on "parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship," which in itself is a subject I am beginning to understand the weirdness of, now that I've finally developed some literary friendships that are both truly friendships but are, inevitably, professional as well. His conclusion on the subject ("it's the work which is a commodity, not you") is worthwhile though inevitably slippery and tough to put into practice, but it's almost beside the point.
What's great about the piece is the historical artifact he unearthed to discuss, and the skillful and dramatic way he draws out the elements of his artifact. The artifact is a 1961 letter William Faulkner wrote to a young writer named Joan Williams, explaining why he wouldn't give her a rave blurb for her first novel. Fair enough--it's the sort of letter just about every writer of any consequence must have to write from time to time (or at least imply, by not writing). But this letter turns out to hold much more, indeed to pack in as much narrative power per square inch as any of Faulkner's stories, and much of the pleasure of the piece comes from the way Gold draws out its surprising elements in sequence.
It's not the sort of effect easy to capture in excerpt, of course, so I'll give you this but ask you to read the whole thing (it's certainly worth it):
He has already looked over her shoulder for external enemies (editors, and we love them for it, are transactional by job description), and dismissed the possibility it was a self-motivated request. Is this something like rescuing her? Telegraphing that if she were truly compassionate about her friendship with William Faulkner, she would know not to commodify it?
Hard to say, as his snap-of-a-rubber-band-against-the-wrist response is so awful. He has done something only a man who has toiled in Hollywood, turned bitter, and won could do: written a blurb that he must know a smart editor could turn into this: “A compassionate and hopeful first novel” — William Faulkner.
But his genius runs deeper than that. He knows the acceptable blurb is writhing just out of reach, if all Joan Williams needed to do was hand it over, shrinking and humiliated, but also aware that she had landed a big fish.
This is early in the discussion. It--and the letter--get even better. (And one side note about a relevant but unmentioned detail about literary relationships that many readers will bring to the situation: Mr. Gold, an admired novelist in his own right, is married to Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones and no doubt an even more sought-after blurb-giver than himself.)
*--The photo above is of the plot outline of A Fable, as relettered by Faulkner himself on the wall of his writing room after his wife had it painted over, taken on my visit to Rowan Oak this summer.
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