Alison Croggon wrote:
> Hi Judy - The US has Melville, what else does it want? 
I was and remain fascinated by Bartleby and Billy Budd, less so with 
Moby. The Divine Fyodor (and Cervantes before him) ruined me for long 
novels.

Judy's claim that we're all out for a Fame Is the Spur thing implies 
movie contracts, showing up at Hollywood openings with trophy boy or 
girl toys, Oprah's Book Club. Right, the Bestseller, the movie deal.

Perhaps the most tragic story I know is by Harvey Swados, "The Man in 
the Tool House," in which Ralph Everett, a gifted and totally driven 
engineer spends years writing a novel in a shed at the back of his 
property. It gets a NY publisher. It sells. But Ralph wants more: he 
wants respect from literary kultur. And that he cannot get. The reviews 
in the "learned journals" are scathing and/or condescending. Ralph takes 
his own life. Yes, rather pat, formulaic, contrived. Swados was not 
Faulkner. Yet the dilemma is right there: you want respect from the 
Dwight MacDonalds and Irving Howes of that age, or you want to make 
money. Ralph wants both. Money comes, respect does not.

Shandy is an hysterical book, a mind-f**k. I would think the only 
inheritor is Pynchon but I haven't read ever novel ever written in the 
20th and 21st. Actually...Wm Seward Burroughs in his surreal moments 
comes rather close in tone to Sterne. So what was Sterne smoking?
> How, then, can we have excellent novels, short stories, plays, or poems?  We
> cannot, except for the exceptional:  TS Eliot.

I will set aside my personal feelings. The idea seems to be that these 
names count for nothing: Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, James, Wharton, 
Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Pynchon, Roth 
(Henry and/or Philip), Burroughs, etc., etc., pick your bête noir. Not 
everyone is "good," surely. Not everyone can be world standard a la 
Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and I'm not going to waste time typing out the 
names of Famous European Novelists. They're dead and don't need press 
agentry.

The complaint here sounds like the aggressive kvetching of the late 
Dennis Jasudowicz in the Tulane Drama Review back in the mid-Sixties. He 
laments the horrid state of American drama. Paraphrase: "Aren't I 
forgetting Miller, Albee, O'Neill? No, I can't even remember them." But 
a play in which street punks soak a bum in gasoline and immolate him is 
high art.... Okay, it recalls Luckner's "A Cry in the Streets" or some 
of Ghelderode's more perverse outings, but Jasudowicz was merely 
sickening, Titus Andronicus without the jokes.

Enough. My mind is in the coffin there with Caesar and I must pause 'til 
it come back to me.

Ken