And that is a sort of role, perhaps.Īge and outmoded purity and patience may kill sometimes. But, indeed, he makes his point a certain pleasure, or relief, lies in the assurance that a genuine paranoid solidity cannot be absorbed by American life, that it will not break to the crush of the tooth. on my conscience.” Unpleasant, insignificant, intransigent man-born without an accommodating joint, trying to grasp without thumbs. With his special beam of despairing self-satisfaction, he said, “The students know no more about punctuation than a fly in the air! No, I will not have an illiterate Ph.D. Even teaching, our first and last refuge, had closed its heart after the poor writer gave out too many failing grades. His theme is, “If you’re not a pederast, a junkie, a Negro-not even a ‘white Negro,’ ha, ha!-you haven’t a dog’s chance! Just put your foot in a publisher’s office and someone will step on it!” This novelist, in his middle fifties, has known a regular recurrence of literary disaster and yet he has stayed on the old homestead, planting seeds year after year, like those farmers in drought places who greet each season’s dryness with anguished surprise. ![]() But the man is not a character in a book he is himself a writer. Good! True characters, men with a classical twitch, are still alive, old veterans with their frayed flags, creatures such as fiction used to tell of. He seems to be out of a novel rather than to be writing a novel. A relief to believe his desperation and obsolescence are somehow closer to literature than to life. He is dark, rather small and thin, hostile and yet briefly hopeful, brightly beaming with suspiciousness. ![]() The door bell rings and you are face to face with an outcast who has come on some errand of career that can never be accomplished. Is there anyone who hasn’t, as we say in our expressive rhetoric, made it? If one hardly knows what to reject, how much harder it is to be oneself rejected. One does not know what to reject, what old alley of desolation to resent, what corner of newness to despise. The warm yellow brick and faded blue trim still glow in the afternoon sun pigeons tend their nests inside, squatting until the verdict is handed down about this waiting, hurt space. Outside my house the old Central Park Stables are empty, the windows broken. Here in New York you walk about the shattered, but still unreformed, streets and it seems the city has suffered a scar or wound that has not only changed its appearance but altered its purpose and deepest nature. Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |