A useful way to categorize writers is the degree to which they write like and for adolescents, as not fully mature adults. I’m extrapolating from an exchange of comments and emails I had last week with Rabbi David Wolpe. I had written something disparaging about Dylan Thomas and his well-known villanelle. The rabbi replied: “To be fair to Thomas[,] raging was the attitude of a young man and since he never lived to be an old one, having drunk himself early into the grave, he never reached the equanimity of age.”
All true, though I told
him he was more forgiving than I and sent him a link to Catherine Davis’ villanelle
“After a Time,” which may be her response to Thomas’ poem. The rabbi admired Davis' poem and added:
“I feel like there is a
whole category of fundamentally adolescent writers -- Vonnegut, Salinger,
certainly Kerouac, Thomas, (a little bit [Milan] Kundera though above those)
but Thomas does have the excuse of never seeing full adulthood.”
This instantly made sense
and helped me understand the enduring appeal of certain writers whose reputations and popularity exceed their accomplishments. Vonnegut always seemed to be a “YA” writer – a slight,
shallow, occasionally amusing storyteller, never outgrowing the demands of his
chosen genre, science fiction. I do enjoy the film version of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five,
a comedy with pretensions to being an “antiwar manifesto.” It’s no surprise
that Vonnegut came to prominence in the sixties, with the triumphant rise of literature-as-propaganda,
neo-romanticism and juvenilia. We might think of him as the anti-George Eliot. Kerouac,
like other seriously alcoholic writers, is unreadable. His prose reeks of
vodka.
One is reminded of the embarrassingly bad and popular Richard Brautigan. American literature seems
especially rich in such writers. Other once-revered names sharing at least some
of these qualities are Jack London, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway (apart from the brilliance
of his early short stories), Charles Bukowski, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck. Alcoholism may
have a role in their willful immaturity. It takes American writers a long time to
grow up, and some never succeed.
4 comments:
Surely dying young is no excuse. Keats died young (25), Thomas died middle-aged (just before his 40th birthday), old enough to know better. He would never have grown up, however long he lived.
Well, people do differ and reach maturity at different ages- I'm just proud to be quoted in AE!
Add someone who was dear to me once upon a time (I still have a soft spot for him), Thomas Wolfe.
Many of the writers you note were people of a certain time and that time is gone. I read Vonnegut, Kerouac, Brautigan etc. in high school because they were people of that time, hyped by the media and those who should have known better. Hemingway, London, Steinbeck already by that time seemed dated. Today's equivalent will probably be the DEI writers - e.g. that my son was forced to read in high school and college. As for youth, there is always Thos. Mann's remarkable Buddenbrooks written when he was 26.
Post a Comment