Maxwell, Melville, Cather

“Writers — narrative writers — are people who perform tricks”: William Maxwell, from “The Writer as Illusionist,” a speech given at Smith College, March 4, 1955. Maxwell then reads and comments on some opening sentences, first Wuthering Heights, then “The Open Boat.” And then,

“Call Me Ishmael . . . .” A pair of eyes looking into your eyes. A face. A voice. You have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands; who will love you in a way that is upsetting and uncomfortable.

Here is another trick: “Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those gray towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much grayer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere . . . .”

A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in.

I found this speech by chance this past weekend, while browsing in a Library of America volume. Crazy synchronicity: Maxwell’s sequence is the sequence of things in our household’s Summer Reading Club, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick followed Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. For the first time ever, Elaine and I are reading the same book at the same time, same number of pages a day. It’s a great pleasure. We are now finishing Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, to be followed by Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada. We use two copies so that there’s no fighting. And we have side books: Elaine, Swann’s Way ; me, A Briefer History of Time . We have started as a Vacation Reading Club but plan to keep going come fall, meeting almost every day, after lunch, on the sofa. We should probably read some William Maxwell too. (I’ve read only So Long, See You Tomorrow.)

Matt Thomas of Submitted for Your Perusal has let me know of a reference to Melville and Cather in a New York Times piece earlier this month. The Summer Reading Club must be in sync with a tiny fraction of the zeitgeist, or it with us.

Related reading
All OCA Melville and Cather posts (Pinboard)

Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[Dustin, July 21, 2015.]

+1 for the hyphen.

The punchline: “My friends and I set up text alerts.”

Related reading
Bryan Garner on phrasal adjectives (LawProse) : Graphite-grey : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Kyle Wiens, stickler?

[About the post title: I couldn’t resist turning phrasal adjective into a phrasal adjective.]

“[A] slow proposition on the market”

Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, February 6, 1922. Cather had been invited to lecture at the Bread Loaf School of English. She is wondering whether the school plans to cover her travel and living expenses:

A slow-selling author, who pays little attention to in-come, has to pay attention to out-go, or be in the hole at the end of the year. Now, I am NOT, with tightly compressed lips, throwing your magnificent sales in your face! I’m not a bit sore about being a slow proposition on the market; but I have to cut my plans according to my cloth in order to avoid worrying.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Related reading
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

“[A]lone with the old things”

Niel Herbert likes being in the Forresters’ house:


[From Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923).]

William Tell’s Chapel (there are, in fact, three chapels associated with Tell) was a popular subject for artists: here is one engraving. The House of the Tragic Poet, as it is called, stood in Pompeii. A Getty Museum essay (with several engravings) explains: “Named after its mosaic depicting the rehearsal of a satyr play, the House of the Tragic Poet was decorated throughout with scenes from the epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” The Captain and Mrs. Forrester’s sitting room has “large, old-fashioned engravings” on its walls.

This passage’s emotional resonance requires, I think, no explanation.

Also from A Lost Lady
“Happy days!” : Weather

Thomas Browne in the Times

The New York Times in 2012, on Thomas Browne:

it seems that he is now once again in the process of being exhumed and immortalized, as he almost certainly expected he would be.

The article cites a resurgence of interest in Browne: a New Directions edition of Urne-Buriall selling in unlikely places, a New York Review Books edition of Urne-Buriall and Religio Medici edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, and a forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of all of Browne’s writing. “Taken together,” says 2012 Times, “the efforts represent the most sustained attention devoted to Browne since the 1960s.”

The New York Times in 2015, on Thomas Browne:

Are you feeling guilty yet for not having heard of Sir Thomas Browne? Or, if you have heard of him, for not spending more time savoring his greatest work, an essay on funerary rites alluringly titled Urne-Buriall [ . . . ]? You shouldn’t, really. You are hardly alone. Browne is a “forgotten” man — so concedes what must be his most obsessive contemporary champion, the English science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is Aldersey-Williams’s attempt to do something about this sad state of affairs.

I am amused by the discrepancy between these two accounts. My guess is that 2015 Times didn’t read 2012 Times. And 2015 perhaps trusted too much in Aldersey-Williams’s picture of things.

And as for “forgotten” Browne is likely unforgettable for anyone who has read his work. The rest is buzz.

A related post
Word of the day: quincunx

Pseudo-mondegreen

“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowin’ through the chasm in my mind.”

Not so much misheard as misremembered, across many years. This song popped into my head yesterday — or, rather, it fell into the chasm in my mind — and now refuses to take its business elsewhere.

Related reading
All OCA mondegreen posts (Pinboard)

[The word is “jasmine,” and the song of course is Seals and Crofts’s “Summer Breeze.”]

Just one more recommendation

I want to second David Hepworth’s recommendation of Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer’s podcast Criminal. What makes is this podcast exceptional, to my mind, is its unpredictability and variety. It’s also refreshingly low-key, and free of the mannerisms that can make podcasts annoying: no ironic background music here. I’ve listened to five episodes so far, about an ex-addict, a book thief, a killer contemplating revenge, a victim of a romance scam, and a man shot by police in his driveway.

Like The Allusionist (of which I’m also fond), Criminal is a member of Radiotopia.

Any good podcasts anyone wants to recommend?

Porky and Bette

 

I am surprised and happy to see that the Internets hadn’t already thought of it.

Domestic comedy

[Olive oil on the tablecloth. Oops.]

“Don’t use the good salt.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[At one time, salt was just salt.]

From A Lost Lady

[From Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923).]

I like this sentence enough to look and think about it all by itself, embedded in a rectangle of snow.

Also from A Lost Lady
“Happy days!”