Gonzalo Barr

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

The Brooklyn brownstone at 70 Willow Street, where Truman Capote rented two basement rooms from 1955 to 1965 and where he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is for sale by Sotheby’s. The asking price is USD 18 million.

According to an article that appeared recently in Le figaro, Capote rented the rooms from Broadway stage designer, Oliver Smith, who created the sets for West Side Story.  Capote plied Smith with martinis on the porch and argued that twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot for one man and that he should rent a couple of them to him.  A few martinis later, Smith agreed.  When Smith was absent, Capote took his guests on a tour of the entire house and pretended that it belonged to him.

Besides “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote also wrote “In Cold Blood” while living there.

Photo: 70 Willow Street in 1936, photographer unknown, Brooklyn Heights Blog (May 10, 2010)(accessed June 1, 2010); Sources:  Adèle Smith, “La maison où vivait Truman Capote est à vendre,” Le figaro (May 12, 2010)(accessed May 25, 2010), Sotheby’s International Realty website listing of the property, Alison Flood, “Brooklyn home where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s goes on sale,” Guardian (May 11, 2010)(accessed May 28, 2010)

Ray Bradbury was born in 1920 and graduated from high school in 1938, bringing to an end his formal education.  From then on, he read books and magazines in public libraries and newsstands.  A library, this time at UCLA, was also the place where he wrote his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451.  He sat for nine-hour sessions before a commercial typewriter that cost him a dime to use for thirty minutes.  “You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour ran out.” It cost him USD 9.80 to type the 25,000-word manuscript that he entitled, “The Fireman.”  The novella was first published in Galaxy magazine in 1950.  Soon after, Ballantine Books asked him to add another 25,000 words for publication as a book.  Bradbury did that and renamed it, Fahrenheit 451.

Like other autodidacts, Bradbury is suspicious of schooling.  Moreover, he does not believe that writing fiction can be taught.

INTERVIEWER
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY
Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library.  […] I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

INTERVIEWER
You have said that you don’t believe in going to college to learn to write. Why is that?

BRADBURY
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.

Photo:  Ray Bradbury (1975), photo by Alan Light, from the article about Ray Bradbury, Wikipedia; Sources: Stephanie Harnett, “Ray Bradbury, on Fellini and the bag of dimes it took to write ‘Farenheit 451,’” Los Angeles Times (Apr. 26, 2009)(accessed May 19, 2010), Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (50th Anniversary Edition), “Afterword,” at 168, Sam Weller, “Ray Bradbury: The Art of Fiction No. 203,” The Paris Review, Spring 2010 (accessed May 19 2010)

Some realities about the professional writing life in the Twenties –

Fitzgerald never wrote what is now called a blockbuster. This Side of Paradise (1920) made the Publishers’ Weekly monthly best-seller list twice, reaching number four; The Beautiful and Damned (1922) appeared three times, reaching number six. The Great Gatsby never made the best-seller list and did not break 24,000 copies in 1925. Tender Is the Night was number two for April 1934, but did not sell 15,000 copies that year. In 1929 his royalties on seven books totalled [sic] $31.77; and eight Post stories brought him $31,000.

Ninety years ago, even fifty years ago (in Cheever and Updike’s time), a writer could make a living publishing short stories.  Numerous mainstream magazines published short stories and serialized novels and they paid very well. The late Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli, blamed the rise of television in the Fifties and Sixties for the demise of these magazines.

The [Saturday Night] Post and the other “slick” magazines…paid well because pre-television Americans had a large appetite for magazine fiction.  […]  During the Twenties, the Post’s circulation and advertising revenues enabled it to provide between 200 and 300 pages each week for a nickel.

Two to three hundred pages each week amounted to a minimum of 10,400 pages a year that the Post needed to fill. And that was only one magazine.  Fitzgerald’s work also appeared in Collier’s, Red Book, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Metropolitan and Hearst International.  It is not surprising that Fitzgerald made significantly more money from his magazine writing than from his novels.   He was not alone.  The same was true of William Faulkner.  Even Hemingway could not live off the royalties on his novels until many years later.

Photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1937) by Carl Van Vechten, Lib. of Congress, Wikipedia article about F. Scott Fitzgerald; Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman, editors, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996), at 13, 14

And perhaps the cure for “writer’s block” –

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Image: bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1799-1800), after the Roman original, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, Wikipedia; Source: brainyquote.com

Forty-eight years ago today, Ernest Hemingway woke early, loaded a shotgun, and killed himself in the kitchen of his house in Ketchum, Idaho.  He was sixty-one years old, though he was a very old sixty one. (The picture above shows Hemingway in Cuba, still in his fifties.)

For years, Hemingway had been suffering from depression (which he called “black ass”) and receiving electroshock (ECT) treatments at the Mayo clinic for it.  We don’t know yet if there is a suicide gene or even a depression gene, but we do know that people with relatives who suffer from depression have an increased likelihood of suffering from the disease themselves. The same is true for suicide. Hemingway’s father, sister, and brother committed suicide. His granddaughter did as well.  (Only this week, three scientific teams reported their findings that schizophrenia and manic-depression are linked genetically. The abstract, dated July 1, 2009, is here.)

The argument that he killed himself because he knew he was finished as a writer is wrong on two counts. First, even if Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was his worst novel (and a terrible novel it was too), shortly after that he wrote, The Old Man and the Sea, a novella that would vindicate his reputation. More significantly, when he died, he was working on A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden, both of which were edited and published posthumously and both of which are among his best works. He was also working on Islands in the Stream, which though not a masterpiece, was a good, solid novel, especially when you consider the fact that it was left in its early stages. Hemingway had intended it to be a sweeping epic-length book of which we have a small part.

Debunking Hemingway became the favorite pastime shortly after he died. Wrestling with the person, a creation of the media that he was more than willing to exploit himself, proved too easy for those proselytizing the “Sixties.”  Now that the dust has settled and all the crap about his “gender” can be trashed as so much Freudian gobbledygook, we are free to look at his work and judge it on its own.

One hundred years ago today, Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo to a Uruguayan father who worked as a clerk in customs and a Brazilian mother, a Gaúcha (in Portuguese), from Rio Grande do Sul.  Unlike so many other writers, whose relationships with their families can be described as difficult at best, Onetti once referred to his parents as “encantadores” (charming) and his childhood as a happy one.  And though most commentators would place him next to other writers comprising the Latin American “Boom,” Onetti was a lone wolf.  (In the interviewed he gave to Spanish television, below, he said that he had been “dragged” into the Boom.)  He never flirted with any form of activism or indulged in “magic realism” (something that thankfully has been abandoned by most contemporary writers in Latin America) or nativism, naturalism, or any of the other -isms that can obfuscate the nature and quality of a writer’s work.  Some commentators have referred to him as one of the few existentialists in Latin American writing, but the fact is that he was his own writer.

Onetti dropped out of high school after the first year to work at odd jobs — doorman, stadium cashier, adding machine salesman.  In 1930, he married and moved from Montevideo to Buenos Aires.  In 1933, he published for the first time, Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo, a short story, in the Argentine newspaper, La Prensa.  A year later, he returned to Montevideo, divorced his first wife and married her sister.  The Spanish Civil War forced a large number of Spaniards to emigrate to America.  They settled everywhere on the continent, but the largest numbers settled in Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina.  (In the same television interview, below, Onetti credited this influx of Spaniards with the explosive growth of publishers at the time.  According to him, he and a lot of other writers would not have published but for this growth.  It would be an interesting thesis to explore — the role of Spanish immigrants in America, the development of modern publishing houses, and the origin of the “Boom.”  Stated differently, would the “Boom” have happened without the Spanish Civil War?)

In 1939, Onetti was named editor of the magazine, Marcha, where he lived in a back room.  And he published his first novella, El pozo (The Pit), a work that is still considered one of his best.  Only 500 copies were published and it was not published again until 1965.  In the story, he introduced a kind of protagonist who would dominate his works, the modern male as a recumbent and lazy do-nothing [my translation to English follows the original Spanish] –

Me paseaba con medio cuerpo desnudo, aburrido de estar tirado, desde mediodía, soplando el maldito calor que junta el techo y que ahora, siempre, en las tardes, derrama adentro de la pieza. Caminaba con las manos atrás, oyendo golpear las zapatillas en las baldosas, oliéndome alternativamente cada una de las axilas. Movía la cabeza de un lado a otro, aspirando, y esto me hacía crecer, yo lo sentía, una mueca de asco en la cara. La barbilla, sin afeitar, me rozaba los hombros.

* * *

I paced, half-naked, bored of lying down, since noon, breathing this damned heat that sticks to the ceiling and that now, always, in the afternoon, pours into the room. I walked with my hands behind me, listening to my slippers slap the tiles, smelling each axilla. I turned my head from one side to the other, inhaling, and this made worse, I could feel it, a look of disgust on my face.  My chin, unshaven, rubbed my shoulders.

It isn’t difficult to see why some commentators tried to label his work “concrete realism.” The quoted paragraph was hardly the stuff for polite society, especially in the 1930s.   I’ve always found the application of the term “realismo concreto” to Onetti’s work more telling of the person using it or of the period in which it was used than of the work itself.  After all, no one ever tossed anything like that at Joyce’s Ulysses. And it’s hard to think of a bodily function that isn’t narrated by Joyce, sometimes (to use an Americanism) “graphically” so.  Perhaps what was deemed obscene in Joyce’s time was considered “realistic” a few years later.

El pozo is the story of a man, a laborer, who is plagued by the memory of a rape he committed years before.  That his victim later died only adds to the guilt the man feels.  He imagines the girl’s ghost stalking him.  The story also introduces Onetti’s view of life as claustrophobic rented rooms filled with heat and stagnant air and hopelessness.

In 1941, he left Marcha and worked for Reuters.  He also published his first full-length novel, Tierra de nadie (No Man’s Land) and returned to Buenos Aires.  A couple of years later, he published another novel, Para esta noche (For This Night).  In 1945, he married for the third time.  Four years after that, he published in the Buenos Aires newspaper, La nación, the short story, La casa en la arena.  There, he introduced the city of Santa María, which would become the scene of many more novels and stories, a fictional city, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county.  And he introduced the recurring character of Dr. Díaz Grey (sounds like “gray days”).

In 1950, Onetti published, La vida breve (A Brief Life).  He considered it his best work. (Many think it is his masterpiece.) It was also his breakthrough novel, the work through which he became known outside a narrow circle of intellectuals in the Southern Cone.

Five years later, he moved back to Montevideo and married his fourth and last wife.  He also edited the daily, Acción.  In 1961, the first translation of his work, the short story, Bienvenido, Bob, appeared in French.  Six years later, he won second place in the Rómulo Gallego literary prize given in Caracas.  The first place winner that year, which was also the first year the prize was given, was Mario Vargas Llosa for La casa verde, who nonetheless graciously lauded Onetti’s work.  (Only this year, Vargas Llosa published a book about Onetti’s work.  From the description of the book, “The subject of fiction and life is a constant that, since distant times, has been expressed through literature. Yet in the work of no other modern author does it have the force and inventiveness as it does in the short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti. It is not an exaggeration to say that Onetti s work is almost entirely conceived to show the subtle and rich way in which human beings have built a parallel existence made up of words and images as unreal as they are persuasive to take refuge in when we want to escape the tragedies and limitations that real life imposes upon our freedom and dreams. In this essay, Vargas Llosa examines how Onetti used fiction to create an alternate reality a reality in which the answer to our daily defeats is fleeing to a fantasy world.”)

In 1975, Onetti moved to Madrid.  Meanwhile, his work was translated to Italian, as well as gathered and published in several collections.

Here is a 1977 interview of Juan Carlos Onetti (about 44 minutes, in Spanish) –

He received several literary prizes of distinction, but in 1980 he received the biggest prize of all, the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious prize in Spanish-language literature.  He published his last novel, Cuando ya no importe (Past Caring) in 1993, as a kind of literary testament.  A year later, he died in Madrid.

One can speculate why so few of Onetti’s works have been translated into English.  It would be easiest to chalk it up to the mythical three percent, that belief by many that only three percent of books published in any year are translations.  Like so many figures, the “three percent” is likely a myth, a number created out of thin air with no factual support.  Still, no one can refute the fact that translations comprise a very small number of fiction books in the US.  And of those books, an increasing number are devoted to the more commercial works of a Pérez Reverte or a Ruíz Zafón, whose mysteries sell by the millions in countless other translations.

Another reason why Onetti may not be well known in the US is the fact that he preferred the short story and the novella over the novel.  Anyone who has ever tried to publish fiction here will know the truism that short story collections are next to impossible to sell, this in a country that gives so much lip service to the genre.

One can speculate why Onetti remains unknown in the US and why so few of his works have been translated to English.  He was never a “boy wonder” or the “it” writer of the moment.  He did not burst into the literary scene, as we have come to expect in an age of media hype.  It took Onetti’s work decades before it was widely recognized in the hispanophone world for what it is, a singular and unique body of fiction that merits being placed among the very best.  Perhaps it may take decades before the same occurs to his works in English.  Meanwhile, too many people in the US are still drunk with “magic realism.”  Like partygoers suffering from a bad hangover, they linger unsteadily in Macondo, long after everyone else has left it behind.

My colleague and friend, Palimp, wrote a moving personal note on his discovery of Onetti’s work.  Another colleague and friend, Bartleby, also wrote two posts on the works of Onetti.

Photo: Juan Carlos Onetti;  Sources: The official website of Juan Carlos Onetti. See also Antonio Astorga, “Cuando Onetti sí importa,” ABC (accessed July 1, 2009), Mario Vargas Llosa, “El viaje a la ficción,” Letras Libres (Feb. 2008)(accessed July 1, 2009)(an essay that was perhaps the germ of the book cited above), Javier Rodríguez Marcos, “Cien años de un genio perezoso,” El país (June 21, 2009)(accessed July 1, 2009).  Video:  Radio Televisión Española and Joaquín Soler, “A fondo,” (1977), Google videos.

In a previous post, I wondered whatever happened to Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow.  The book was supposed to come out in 2008, but was then delayed one year.  It is now scheduled for publication in September 2009.  No one knows for sure whether the publisher will make that date, but we do know one thing — Amis finished writing it the first week of this month, May 2009.

Recently, the Spanish newspaper, ABC, interviewed Amis during the Hay Festival in Granada, Spain and, as a result, we now know that –

*The novel took him six years to write (more than three times the average for Amis)
*It is based in 1970s Italy
*It is set during the sexual revolution in that country

May is almost over so what we really have are three months or so before the publication date.  Meanwhile, the anticipation continues to build.

An earlier post on The Pregnant Widow and the delayed publication of that book is here.

Source: Leslie J. López, “El escritor Martin Amis agradece a ETA el asesinato de Carrero Blanco,” ABC (May 11, 2009)

Alain de Botton’s book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, will be published next month.  The author called his book “a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty, and horror of the modern workplace.”  In it, he examines workers in manufacturing and service industries, places as diverse as a cookie factory and an accounting firm.  Recently, he was asked what he thought of work –

Alongside love, work is the number one area of fantasy where people imagine they will find happiness. […] Freud famously believed that the two ingredients you need to get right for satisfaction are work and love. […T]here is a role [in our society] for busyness, for throwing yourself into a job that consumes all your energy and prevents you from thinking — where you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’ve done an honest day’s work.

Source: “Honest Work,” Departures (May/June 2009), at 62

In an earlier post, I published a quote from Montaigne that I thought was “answered” by Yeats 300 years later, as if the two had been engaged in a conversation.  Then I did the same thing, only with two writers who were contemporaries from neighboring countries and spoke the same language. The late Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar, seemed to be wondering aloud about a writer’s obligation to be a social or political activist, followed by Chilean writer and filmmaker, Alberto Fuguet’s “answer” that it was no longer the case for younger writers.

This time, I’ve once again chosen two writers who are contemporaries, both born in 1938, in different countries and who work in two different languages.  Yet when they talk about the source of novels, that place where “long narratives” are born, they seem to be in agreement, even using language that is uncannily alike.  First up is Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa [the translation to English is mine, though I have re-arranged the order of his answers for the sake of clarity] –

Al empezar una obra, tengo “una inquietud, un desasosiego respecto de un personaje o una situación.”  Tomo “pequeñas” notas, esquelas y trayectorias “sin estar seguro” de qué voy a escribir.  “Al inicio siempre voy a tientas.  Con algunos libros me ha pasado que he trabajado uno o dos años sin tener claro cuál iba ser la historia final.  […] Hasta que de pronto todo eso empieza a ponerse en marcha y empiezo a escribir, pero sin saber al principio a dónde voy.”

***

At the beginning of a work, I have “an uncertainty, a curiosity about a character or a situation.”  I write “little” notes, sketches and story lines “without being sure” what I am going to write about.  “At the beginning I always feel my way around.  I have worked one or two years on some books without being clear about the final story.  […]  Until, suddenly, everything clicks together and I start to write, but without knowing at first where I am going.”

Here’s DeLillo –

“That’s how you write novels actually. You suddenly hit upon something and you realize this is the path you were meant to take. You’d be a fool if you didn’t follow it. Perhaps it’s like solving a difficult question in pure mathematics. There must be a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn’t come upon it before. When you do come upon it, you know it in the deepest part of your being. It carries its own logic.”

I hope this serves as a lesson to all those procrastinators out there who think they must first have their novels outlined perfectly, like the final plans to an unborn city, before sitting down to write.

Sources: “Vargas Llosa dice que su obra de ficción parte de incertidumbre y desasosiego,” El nuevo Herald (Feb. 8, 2009), at 11-B, John Wilde, “The Day John Kennedy Died,” Melody Maker (Nov. 19, 1988), at 52-53 (quoting Don DeLillo on writing novels), http://www.perival.com/delillo/ddinterviews.html