Deep near the bottom of an Ohio winter, months after we had last seen greenery, a promise of spring more reliable than the first robin would arrive in the mailbox – the rose catalogs. As best I can remember, my mother killed nearly everything she tried to grow, but the colorful catalogs came as a welcome spring tease. I’m no gardener, but the Library of America’s spring catalog has arrived, and the news is mostly as bleak as an endless Northern winter.
Pictures of five writers appear on the cover, starting at the top with a gloomy-looking Saul Bellow. Considering some of the company he has to keep, I sympathize. The good news is that the LOA is publishing his Novels 1956-1964, dating from the years when Bellow was in his peerless prime: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog. The new volume, like the first, is edited by James Wood.
Next, moving clockwise, comes a striking oil portrait of Thornton Wilder. My high school, of course, staged Our Town. That’s my only first-hand exposure to Wilder’s work. LOA is publishing his Collected Plays & Writings on Theater. Next is a tinted engraving of Capt. John Smith, whose Writings is scheduled to be published in March. Historically, the book is essential, but like the Wilder it’s not something I would read.
Now for the bad news, in ascending order of badness. Also coming in March is John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962. One of the first “adult” novels I read was The Grapes of Wrath, in an early edition preserved from my mother’s younger years. I liked the novel, as I liked Of Mice and Men, but I was 11 or 12 years old and I also liked Isaac Asimov. The clumsiness of the Dreiserian prose (unanimated by Dreiser’s gift for primal characterization) and Steinbeck’s ham-fisted sentimentality soon made him unreadable. In a junior-high English class, we were assigned The Pearl, which I also found unreadable. Teachers are still using Steinbeck to inoculate students with Noble Feelings and a Social Consciousness, a practice probably rooted in homeopathy. Literature is not good for your health.
To save the worst for last, the LOA in June will publish Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s. I suppose their earlier publication of H.P Lovecraft signaled the opening of the floodgates to any species of pulp-trash. Dick is unreadable, so of course he has accumulated an academic cheerleading squad. He must have hated language, or was at least indifferent to its charms, which seems perverse in a writer. Is it technically possible to say that a writer is illiterate?
About 25 years ago, when Dick partisans (so to speak) were rallying in the wake of his death and the appearance of Blade Runner, I tried unsuccessfully to read The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was a forced march I was never able to complete. Even by the compromised standards of science fiction and other genre fiction, Dick’s books were awful and left me feeling unclean for having tried to read them.
I guess two (or three) out of five is better than wretched. No wonder Bellow looks so disconsolate.
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4 comments:
I'm a big fan of LOA, though admittedly more in theory/longing than in execution/purchasing. The only volume I have so far is Farrell's "Studs Lonigan" trilogy, of which I've read the first novel and enjoyed quite a bit. The Lovecraft/Dick inclusions are a bit puzzling, I'll admit, but I have to give LOA credit for stylistic diversity. Still, any publisher which puts out such handsome additions of Dreiser and Dos Passos is a-ok with me.
By the way, the line "Dick is unreadable, so of course he has accumulated an academic cheerleading squad." is brilliant. Though I've never read Dick, I appreciate your general sentiment about academic-darling writers.
I may recall incorrectly, but it seems Phillip Larkin mentions somewhere in Required Writing, to paraphrase, “only being able to read Philip K. Dick novels anymore,” i.e., as against literary criticism, “serious” fiction, etc. I just took it as typical low-brow posturing by PL (before low-brow posturing was cool, right?), having myself never cracked a PKD book before. Now I wonder if he was joking.
As to LOA – I wonder how much these selections are conditioned by financial considerations? I don’t even know that a $35.00 volume of Phillip K. Dick or H.P. Lovecraft is going to sell more copies than Herman Melville, but why else would they devote the LOA’s limited funds to such profligate expansion of the catalog? It can’t really be just academic trendiness, can it? In any case, my complaint is that we lack an equivalent to the old J.M. Dent Everyman or Random House Modern Library series – hardback classics that were not necessarily heirlooms and were relatively inexpensive. LOA editions just seem heirloomish to me, almost too fine for daily use, as do contemporary Modern Library and Everyman volumes.
I'm glad you wrote this. I've never been able to read Dick either.
Saul Bellow is the most overrated writer in the history of letters. Plus, he obviously hated black people. Other than that, I'm sure he's a great guy.
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