Barrel-scraping continues at the Library of America. My fall catalog arrived Thursday with a portrait on the cover by the wonderful Fairfield Porter. The bad news is that it’s a portrait of John Ashbery, whose Collected Poems 1956-1987 will be canonized by the LoA in October. After 40 years of half-heartedly trying to read Ashbery, out of a misguided sense of obligation and hoping to figure out what the fuss was all about, I’ve accepted that he has never given me pleasure, not even at the level of line or phrase, and never will. Ashbery is one of those poets with nothing to say who insists on saying it at great length. He’s dull, tin-eared, pretentious and generally incoherent, a fraud who has flummoxed a sizeable minority of readers and critics. Lumping Ashbery with the other poets in the so-called New York School (Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler), John Simon once wrote:
"To put my cards on the table . . . I declare that none of these poets has written what I would call a single poem of any importance."
On to the good news: Scheduled for publication in September is William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories. Earlier this year the LoA published his Early Novels and Stories, and Maxwell’s admirers will observe the centenary of his birth on Aug. 16. The new collection includes The Chateau; So Long, See You Tomorrow (one of the finest novels of the last century); and “Stories and Improvisations 1957-1999.”
Also coming out in September is the LoA’s fifth volume of Philip Roth’s complete work, Novels and Other Narratives, including The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception and the beautiful Patrimony. Writers as various as William H. Gass, V.S. Pritchett and Eudora Welty have lauded Katherine Ann Porter, whose Collected Stories and Other Writings comes out in October. I’ve never quite shared their enthusiasm.
Finally, the LoA continues its recent mercenary turn toward pandering with True Crime: An American Anthology. The editor, Harold Schechter, includes such writers of rubbish as James Ellroy and Dominick Dunne. More shame on the Library of America, but thanks for the Maxwell.
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2 comments:
I think O'Hara and Kock have each written a few great poems, O'Hara especially, but otherwise I completely agree with your thoughts on Ashbery. Thanks for adding weight and clarity to my own position that he is unreadable and almost always has been. Pretty much a fraud, albeit a successful one. Many poets have tried to get me to read Ashbery. Each time I've tried, it's never been a pleasure, and I never finish anything.
I'll have to dissent re: Ashbery. The pickings can be slim--he resembles a dross mine that produces an incidental crop of diamonds. But the diamonds are there. And fraudulence is not the issue, not any more than it is for O'Hara or Koch, who in some ways resemble domesticated versions of the wild and zany author of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."
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