'There's This Sense of Limitless Depth'

“You can’t touch bottom with the greatest writers. If you read enough Hawthorne, you touch bottom, you see what he’s doing, but not Melville. I’ve read some of Chekhov’s stories over and over and can’t get to the bottom of him. With the greatest writers there’s this sense of limitless depth.”

The OED defines “to touch (also hit, reach) bottom” as “to reach the lowest or worst point.” In the passage above, Evan S. Connell adjusts the idiom a little. In his sense, to touch bottom with a writer’s work is to exhaust it, to ascertain his intentions and all the connotations, often on first reading. Nothing’s left. You can’t return to it and expect something new. This is always the case with so-called genre fiction and, in fact, with most of the books published any given year. Read a Hemingway story or a novel by Toni Morrison and you’ve already plumbed the ocean floor. The best writers solve nothing. They pose more questions than answers and write not so much to be read as to be read a second time and more.

Connell (1924-2013) rarely gave interviews. In literary terms, he seems to have belonged to that race described by Melville as “isolatoes.” Marketing his work held little interest for him. He appears hardnosed and anti-romantic when it comes to writers and the writing life. He never taught, never married or had children and lived a life monkishly devoted to writing. In the interview quoted above, given to The Transatlantic Review in 1976, he is asked to describe his “work habits,” and says: “I work essentially a nine-to-five day, seven days a week, and then take off when I can't stand it any more.” Later in the same interview, asked if he could distill what he wanted to “get across” in his work, Connell replies: “No.”

  

Connell is one of the rare recent American writers whose body of work I’ve read in its entirety. Between 1957 and 2008 he published twenty remarkably varied volumes, and their overall impact was to baffle critics. I reread several of them fairly often but two meet Connell’s untouched-bottom (sounds salacious, doesn’t it?) criteria: in fiction, Mrs. Bridge (1959); nonfiction, Son of the Morning Star (1984). Asked which writers he respects, Connell says:

“Chekhov, Tolstoy, Mann, and I have considerable respect for de Maupassant; even though he's not that deep, he had a great technical facility for producing the effect he wanted.”