Celine talks abut his style

INTERVIEWER:  You caused a scandal with the appearance of Journey [to the End of Night]. Your style shook a lot of habits.

CÉLINE - They call that inventing. Take the impressionists. They took their painting one fine day and went to paint outside. They saw how you really lunch on the grass. The musicians worked at it too. From Bach to Debussy there's a big difference. They've caused some revolutions. They've stirred the colors, the sounds. For me it's words, the positions of words. Where French literature's concerned, there I'm going to be the wise man, make no mistake. We're pupils of the religions—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish . . . Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short—here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, “He knits a nice sentence!” Me, I say, “It's unreadable.” They say, “What magnificent theatrical language!” I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.

INTERVIEWER - That's what you call your “little music,” isn't it?

CÉLINE - I call it “little music” because I'm modest, but it's a very hard transformation to achieve. It's work. It doesn't seem like anything the way it is, but it's quality. To do a novel like one of mine you have to write eighty thousand pages in order to get eight hundred. Some people say when talking about me, “There's natural eloquence . . . He writes like he talks . . . Those are everyday words . . . They're practically identical . . . You recognize them.” Well, there, that's “transformation.” That's just not the word you're expecting, not the situation you're expecting. A word used like that becomes at the same time more intimate and more exact than what you usually find there. You make up your style. It helps to get out what you want to show of yourself.

An Old-time Novel Reading List

1. Atherton, G - The Conqueror
2.  Beach, Rex - The Barrier
3.  Bojer, J.  - The Emigrants 
4. Bennett - Old Wives tales 
5. Boyd, J  - Drums 
6.  Boyd, Thomas - Through the Wheat 
7. Cable, G.W.  - The Cavalier 
8. Churchill, W. - The Crisis 
9. Churchill, W. - The Crossing 
10. De Morgan - Johnathan Vance
11. Dixon - The Clansman
12. Farnol, Jeffery - The Broad Highway
13. Fox - Trail of the Lonesome Pine
14. Herrick - The Common Lot
15. Grey, Zane - Riders of the Purple Sage
16. Lagerlof - Wonderful Adventures of Nils
17. Lincoln - Galusha the Magnificent
18. May - The Divine Fire
19. Nicholson - A Hoosier Chronicle
20. Norris - Mother
21. Sabatini - The Sea Hawk
22. Watts - Nathan Burke
23. Wapole - The Dark Forest
24. White, S.E. - Gold
25. Wright - The winning of Barbara Worth

Literary taste Test - No. 2

Novel C or Novel D?

Novel C

It was one of those mixed blocks over Central Avenue., the blocks of which were not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitros Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said he was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.

I never found him, but Mrs. Aleidis never paid me any money either.

It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barbershop looking up at the jutting neon sign of the second floor dine and dice emporium called "Florian's". A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but no more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me.  His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.

Novel D

"You watch your step, Herzog, Moses. Your mother thinks you'll be a great lamden - a rabbi. But I know you, how lazy you are. Mother's hearts are broken by mamzeirim like you! Eh! Do I know you Herzog?  Through and through."

The only refuge was the W.C. , where the disinfectant camphor balls dwindled in the green trough of the urinal, and old men came down from the shul with webby eyes nearly blind, sighing, grumbling, snatches of liturgy as they waited for the water to come. Urine-crusted brass, scaly-green.  In an open stall, pants dropped to his feet, sat Nachman playing his harmonica, "Its a long way to Tipperary" "Love sends a Little Gift of Roses". The peak of his cap was warped. You heard the saliva in the cells of the tin instrument as he sucked and blew.  The bowler hatted elders washed their hands, gave their beards a finger combing. Moses observed them.

Almost certainly, Nachman ran away from the power of his old friend's memory. Herzog persecuted everyone with it.  It was like a terrible engine.

The Literary taste Test - which do you prefer?

A or B?

Novel A

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom.  "In there Mike" he said.

In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead.  The body. Now I could call it that.  Yesterday, it was Jack Williams, the same guy that shared a mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle.   Jack, the guy who said he'd  give his right arm for a friend, and did when he stopped a Jap bastard from slitting me in two.  He caught the bayonet in his biceps and they amputated his arm.

Pat didn't say a word.  He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face.  For the first time in my life I felt like crying. "Where did he get it Pat?"

"In the stomach. Better not look at it. The Killer carved the nose off a forty-five and gave it to  him low."

Novel B 
Three faces have resolved into place above the summer-weight sports coats and half-Windsors across the polished pine conference table shiny with the splintered light of an Arizona afternoon.  These are three deans - of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs.  I do not know which face belongs to whom.

I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, although I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile.

I have committed to crossing my legs, I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together on in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are matted into a mirrored series of what manifests to me, as the letter X. The interview room's other personnel include: the University's Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and the Academy's prorector's Mr. A.   Delint. C.T. is beside me, the others sit, stand and stand, respectively at the periphery of my focus. The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive about the the room's odor.  The high-traction sole of my complimentary Nike sneaker, runs parallel to the wobbling loafer of my mother's half-brother, here in his capacity as Headmaster, sitting in the chair to my immediate  right, also facing the Deans.

E.M. Forster on Joyce's Ulysses

"Ulysses is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed, where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell" - Aspects of the Novel (1927)

Joyce - Mr. Dooley

'Who is the man when all the gallant nations run to war
Goes home to have his dinner by the very first cablecar
And as he eats his cantelope contorts himself in mirth
To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The coolest chap our country ever knew
‘They are out to collar
The dime and dollar’
Says Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The mildest man our country ever knew
‘Who will release us
From jingo Jesus’
Prays Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the meek philosopher who doesn’t care a damn
About the yellow peril or problem of Siam
And disbelieves that British Tar is water from life’s fount
And will not gulp the gospel of the German on the Mount?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The broadest brain our country ever knew
‘The curse of Moses
On both your houses’
Cries Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the cheerful imbecile who lights his long chibouk
With pages of the pandect, penal code and Doomsday Book
And wonders why bald justices are bound by law to wear
A toga and a wig made out of someone else’s hair?

It’s Mr Dooley,

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The wildest wag our country ever knew
‘O my poor tummy
His backside gummy!’
Moans Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the tranquil gentleman who won’t salute the State
Or serve Nebuchadnezzar or proletariat
But thinks that every son of man has quite enough to do
To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The wisest wight our country ever knew
‘Poor Europe ambles
Like sheep to shambles’
Sighs Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.'

-James Joyce, 1916.

Joyce - Rottenness in Literature

Alfred Noyes
Sunday Chronicle 
October 29, 1922

I have picked on Ulysses because it brings to a head all the different questions that have been perplexing literary criticism for some time. There no answer possible in this case. It is simply the foulest book that has ever found its way into print. Yet it has received columns of attention from many of the leading journals, and its author has been proclaimed a slightly mad genius, but still a genius.

The writing is this book is simply bad as writing, and much of it is obscure through sheer disorder of the syntax. But - there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages.

Yet some of our 'intellectuals', including  one of our leading novelists, have been stating that its author comes within measurable distance of having written the best book in the world.

No word of thought conceivable in Dublin or the New York Bowery is omitted, and the foulest references to real persons in this country, attributing vile diseases to them, amongst other equally disgusting suggestions.

I have recited the case of this book because it is the extreme case of complete reduction of absurdity of what I have I called the "literary Bolshevism of the hour."  It can do little harm, because the police are, on the whole, circumventing our pseudo-intellectuals.

But what concerns all of us, and most urgently demands consideration, is that our Metropolitan criticism should be treating works such as those by Mr. Joyce seriously as a work of genius at the very moment when journal after journal is helping depreciate the value of some of the noblest pages in our literature.

The battle that is being wages over the works of Tennyson, for instance, the assault that has been made on all the Victorian writers - and it is interesting to note that Bolshevik  Russia has recently been declaring that Dickens is more dangerous than Denikin - are indications of the destructive spirit which may lead us on the road to barbarianism.

George Moore on James Joyce

August 3, 1916
Sir Edward Marsh

Now to answer your questions. The only book I've read of Joyce's is "The Dubliners"; a collection of short stories. Some of them are trivial and disagreeable, but all are written by a very clever man, and the book contains one story, the longest story in the book and the last story, which seemed to me to be perfection whilst I read it. I regretted that I was not the author of it.  But this story does not prove that Joyce will go writing, and will end by something like a masterpiece. A talent, musical, literary, or pictorial, is a pale fluttering thing that a breath will extinguish... Of the novel [Portrait of  the Artist as a Young Man]  I know nothing. Joyce left a disagreeable reputation behind him in Dublin, but he came back after some years a different man and everything I heard of him is to his credit.

Ezra Pound on James Joyce

Pound to John Quinn
May 1920

Joyce - pleasing; after the first shell of the cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression of the real man who is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats - Yeats has taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses. Also, great exhaustion, but more constitution than I expected, and apparently a good recovery from the eye operation.

He is, of course, stubborn as a mule or an Irishman, but I failed to find him at all unreasonable. Thank God, he has been stubborn enough to know his job and stick with it. 

1931 Postscript:  "I respect Joyce's integrity as an author, as he has not taken the easy part.  I never had any respect for his common sense or intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer" - Pound in the New Review

The Scandal of Ulysses

The Scandal of Ulysses
Aramis
Sporting Times, no. 34 (April 1922)

After a bored perusal of James Joyce's Ulysses, published in Paris, I can realize one reason  at least for the Yankee judges fined the "Little Review"  $100 for the original publication of a very rancid chapter of the Joyce stuff, which appears to have written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the latrine.

As the readers of the "Pink'un" know, I have dealt appreciatively with many unconventional books in these pages; but I have no stomach for Ulysses...James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses, he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sneering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In to that, this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of the demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation, or other guide as to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it are incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacity intended for humor.

The main contents of the book are enough to make a Hottentot sick. Ulysses would have been boycotted in the palmiest days of Holywell Street. And yet there a number of New York intellectuals who declare that Joyce has written the best book in the world, and that Ulysses is the topmost of them.

Over one supremely nauseous chapter, that the publishers were indicted on,  a great deal of highbrow nonsense was talked in court for the defense by a Mr. Moeller.  He said in bland tones that the chapter was a "Unveiling of the subconscious mind, in the Freudian manner, and that he saw no possibility of these revelations being aphrodisiac in their influence"

The court gasped, and one of the Judges protested: "See  here, you might as well talk in Russian. Speak in plain English if you want us to understand what you are saying".

Moeller was asked what he thought would be the effect of an objectionable chapter on the mind of the average reader.  Moeller responded "I think it would mystify him".

It would have  also have a similar effect of an ordinary emetic. Ulysses is not only pornographic, it is intensely dull.  As the volume is about the size of the London Telephone directory, I do not envy anyone who reads it for pleasure.

HG Wells on James Joyce

November 23, 1928

My dear Joyce,

I've been studying you and thinking over you a lot. The outcome is that I don't think I can anything for the propaganda of your work. I've enormous respect for your genius dating from your earliest books and I feel now a great personal liking but you and I are set on absolutely different courses.

Your training has been Catholic, Irish, insurrectionary,  mine such as it was, scientific, constructive and I suppose English...And while you were brought up under the delusion of political suppression, I was brought up under the delusion of political responsibility.  It seems a fine thing for you to defy and break up. To me not in the least.

Now with regard to this literary experimentation of yours [Finnegan's Wake]. Its a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man, and you have crowded in your composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don't think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on the common man, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and their intelligence and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles.

Your last two works [Ulysses & FW] have been more amusing to write then they ever will be to read. Take me as a common reader. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read Amrep's dreadful translation of Pavlov's badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?

All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I am all wrong.  Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way  to save it from restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its followers. Let them rejoice in it. To me its a dead end.

My warmest wishes to you Joyce.  I can't follow your banner anymore than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong. - H.G. Wells.

James Joyce

Joyce's word games often have a real interest and the parodies of style, although too often blurred, can be amusing; but they have nothing to do with "Literature", which, to have any value, has to be some presentation of in writing of Milton's new aquist* of true experience.

The striking thing about [Ellman's 'James Joyce'] it is how much more rewarding , in terms of the new aquist of Milton's, the book is than anything Joyce ever wrote. The difference I suppose is simply that when you work through Joyce's complications and obscurities you're a little miffed - a second rate mind has no business to conceal itself that way. It isn't too much and too wise for ordinary expression,  its too little and vapid - the ridiculous or at least exasperating mouse out of the mountain. But Ellman's mind is first rate, his comment on Joyce's sad and silly times is full of instruction; this is not just from books, this is real and human and fine food for thought. - James Cozzens.

* = From Milton's Samson Agonistes: 

 His servants he with new aquist**
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

** = acquisition.

Theodore Dreiser

You can't get very far in reading Swanberg's "Dreiser" without concluding on the evidence fairly and fully  offered, that Dreiser was,  almost at his beginning,  in every way just so plain "awful" - a natural-born cheap bastard; actively dishonest whenever he had the chance, stupidly and grossly undiscerning when discernment was called for; and voluminous producer of perhaps the worst English prose ever yet found and printed and bound in books

It really all boiled down to the problem of censorship. Dreiser's "greatness" as a writer consisted of his "boldness" in writing about sexual matters.  He would write as he saw fit and if the self-appointed "vice societies" got his books banned, so be it. All Liberal writers found this stand excitingly admirable,  but in their excitement many of them plainly managed to make themselves blind to the fact that the un-excised lines were as execrable as all the other lines,  and that the unchanged words were no more "unjust" than all the other words - James Cozzens

Dashiell Hammett - an extremely odd duck

And an extremely red one.  I've just finished "Shadow Man" the life of
Dashiell Hammett" by Richard Layman.  Needless to say Layman destroys the romance about him (created by Hellman): that Hammett and Hellman were real life Nick and Nora Charles, that "Dash" was a noble liberal brought down by the nasty red-hunters, and that poor "Dash" couldn't write anymore because of sickness.  All shown to be false and as phony as Hammett's claim to be a highly experienced Detective.

Hammett's odd writing career -Perhaps no 20th successful American author has had such an odd career.  His career can be broken into four phases.  From 1923-1927 Hammett toiled as a free-lance magazine writer - primarily at "Black Mask" a pulp magazine specializing in crime/detective stories. Then came his successful career as a novelist.  From 1928 to 1933 Hammett wrote 5 novels including the two that made him famous "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man".  The third phase was from  1934-1941 during his close association with Hellman.  He helped Hellman write the "The Children's Hour" and "Little Foxes", wrote/co-wrote several "Thin Man" movie scripts, and 

The author was aided by other researchers in gathering facts about Samuel Dashiell Hammett's life. He followed leads, found answers to questions, and interviewed anyone who claimed to have known Dash. SDH worked at different jobs before joining Pinkerton as a detective. He joined the Army in 1917, and contracted a lung disease and TB during the 1918 Flue Pandemic. His disability pension wasn't enough for his family; he studied at a Business College and started to work in advertising. He then began to write for publication. In spite of his lung disease he smoked and he drank.

SDH began to gain success by 1923 with his short stories; he was too sick for any other work. His advertising job ended when he collapsed with bleeding lungs; he also had hepatitis. He renewed his literary efforts, and success followed. He then wrote longer novels, and gained more wealth and fame. He left his family and moved to New York's literary milieu. He indulged in liquor, women, money, and fame; he was "Nick Charles", not "Sam Spade". Drinking handicapped his Hollywood career, and flushed away his talents. Recycling his writings on radio during the 1940s earned him money; this ended after his refusal to testify in 1951. The next ten years were spent in poverty. After his death in 1961 he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, far to the left of Senator Joseph McCarthy

Its hard to think of another successful  novelist who published 5 novels in 6 years, including two famous ones "The Thin Man' and "The Maltese Falcon  and then  stopped writing novels or short stories at the age of 40.  Although Hammett spend time in the 30s Hollywood and Broadway his literary career more or less stopped after "Thin man" and never wrote anything worthwhile in his remaining 27 years.

Why Saul Bellow is boring - Exhibit A

"As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near." 

This is typical Saul Bellow, and one of his "greatest quotes".  Somewhere in this tangled, pompous, mish-mash of words, he's says something very,very IMPORTANT.

  

Saul Bellow- Dullard

To Saul:

Your Books are a bore;
You make me snore;
I shall read you-
No more.

Thank You.

Naked Lunch

Having occasionally shared neighborhoods with junkies, I have always been amazed by how thoroughly uninteresting their lives are. This book confirms my view. It works really hard to make lives of junkies literary interesting, but fails since the material that the author works with is intrinsically dull. One cannot but help shedding a tear for all the trees that has been wasted making this all too thick book.

I  know what you're thinking. "Who's this square that doesn't like Naked Lunch? Must be some kinda conservative nutjob not to like this amazing piece of counter-culture artwork!"

Hey, I get it. You're edgy. Go you. Yes, shocking images of sex and drug use and pedophilia and cannibalism and stickin' it to the man, man. Just leave this where your parents will find it and you know you'll earn cool points with the cats back at school. Leave it on your coffee table while your friends come over and you know you'll get to share some good stories while passin' the bong around, man. I'm sure you're stoked about that.

Sorry, but I hated this book for reasons that differ from why your parents hated it:

1) "Edgy" doesn't sell with me. Maybe in 1959, when this book was first published, this stuff was cutting edge. Maybe it's still cutting edge in the sheltered suburbs of America. But anyone who's been on the internet as long as I have and has long ago found the dark corners has already seen and read far more edgy stuff than what's in this book. You want edgy? I can direct you to some websites that will make Naked Lunch look like a book for 3rd graders.  It's 2013.

2) It's not a good or enjoyable book if the "edgy" thing doesn't catch you. The stories, if you can call them that, are disjointed, often lack internal cohesion even from one page to the next within the same story and just aren't remotely interesting narratives. I get the idea that we are supposed to be taking a wild ride through the drug addled brain of the author but if you've read a quarter of the book, you've read the whole thing -- it's nothing but more and more of the same nonsensical pseudo-stories. By a quarter of the way in I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Drugs messed you up. Let's get on with it." And he never got on with it. Just story after story of cheap "shocker" material that's probably excellent and revealing if you feel like an overly sheltered artist waiting to break out of his protective shell.

For the unsheltered generations, the book is a bore, at best. Maybe it's interesting discussion material regarding the repressed generations of decades gone by, who really had their socks knocked off by what was in this book. Maybe it's interesting discussion material about how some people will like just about anything if they think it makes them look "edgy" in the eyes of their peers. Maybe it's a good book for convincing your kids to stay off drugs, especially if they want to ever become coherent writers.

Although I could appreciate the dark, twisted, imaginative imagery, there was just no real story to speak of. There were hints of satire here and there, but then the prose would just descend into an incoherent mess. I can only recommend this book as a cautionary tale about the nightmarish, horrifying, delusional state that being a heroin junkie must put you in.

"a collection of 3-page surreal vignettes readable in any order." A secondary caveat would be that a lot of the language he uses seems to have inside references -- think of your group of junior high friends and the words you made up with each other.

As far as the language goes, it seems to be a mix of now-dated street slang, Clockwork Orangesque made-up slang, dashed with a few $10 words here and there.

Why America is so Dumb - the non-reading American

According to survey by the Cordex Group (hat-tip Atlantic Mag):

1) 49% of Adult American's haven't read a book in 12 month.  No book. Nada, zip. Not even Harlequin romance or "How to make money on X" or "On cherry street".

2) 39% read  1-11 books a year.  Again, we're talking ANY kind of book.

3) 19%  read at least 12 books a year.

4) 80% of book reading is done by 20% of the people.

Edmund Wilson On Hammett

I went back and read “The Maltese Falcon,” which I assumed to be a classic in the field, since it had been called by Alexander Woollcott “the best detective story America has yet produced” and, at the time of its publication, had immediately caused Mr. Hammett to become what Jimmy Durante, speaking of himself, has called “duh toast of dub intellectuals.” But it was hard for me to understand what they had thought—in 1930—they were toasting. Mr. Hammett did have the advantage of real experience as a Pinkerton detective, and he recharged the old formula of Sherlock Holmes with a certain cold underworld brutality which gave readers a new shudder in the days when it was fashionable to be interested in gangsters; but, beyond this, he lacked the ability to bring the story to imaginative life. As a writer—despite the praise of him one has heard—he is surely almost as far below Rex Stout as Rex Stout is below James M. Cain. “The Maltese Falcon” today seems not much above those newspaper picture strips in which you follow from day to day the ups and downs of a strong-jawed hero and a hardboiled but beautiful adventuress

Hammett's Novels dates written and published

Red Harvest - Draft  - April 1928,  Published  January 1929
Dain Curse - Draft  - June 1928,     Published  June 1929
Maltese Falcon  Draft - June 1929,  Published  January 1930
Glass Key - Draft  - August 1930,  Published  January 1931
Thin Man - Draft  - October 1933, Published February 1934