William Styron, author of Lie Down in Darkness, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie’s Choice, died in 2006. His heirs have put the house in Roxbury, Connecticut where he and his wife lived for sale. The house was built in 1850. Styron and his wife bought it in 1954 and lived there for over fifty years.
The house sits on 4.7 acres, has 4,600 square feet, five bedrooms, a guest house, pool, and a pond with a waterfall. The asking price is USD 2.2 million.
The real estate agents handling the sale describe the house –
This spectacular 1850’s estate was the home of Pulitzer Prize winning author William Styron for over 55 years. Styron was best known for writing Sophie’s Choice. Roxbury is a well-known artist’s colony. The home features 5 bedrooms, a finished attic, several offices, a great room with wet bar and large fireplace and several stone terraces. The property is bordered on 2 sides by land trust and includes a guesthouse, pool, tennis court, pond with waterfall, magnificent antique trees and mature landscaping.
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 –
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
What good are writers’ readings? They are a seminal part of the book tour, of course, a means for readers to meet the writer personally. You show up, talk about your latest book, read selections from it, take a few questions, then autograph copies, leaving in your wake goodwill and sales receipts.
Anyone who started publishing this decade has by now surely discovered that publishers are less than enthusiastic about funding book tours. Let me restate that: If the book tour was a natural part of marketing a new book in the last century, it is not necessarily so this decade.
Today, writers have so many electronic means of “meeting” readers that the cost of touring almost doesn’t make sense except in a few cases. Of course, meeting a writer on line is not the same as meeting a writer in person. Don’t personal meetings, by their very nature, create a greater impact in the audience, establish a deeper and more immediate sense of rapport and name recognition, help the “brand,” if you will?
Well, not always –
[British writer, Graham Swift] recalls a time an audience member asked him why he had chosen to a read a particular passage, and he explained as best he could. “No, no,” said his questioner. “What I meant was, why did you choose that particular author?”
Photo: Graham Swift; Source: Phil Baker, “Colours of memory,” Times Literary Supplement (May 8, 2009), at 13 (reviewing Graham Swift, Making an Elephant: Writing From Within (June 2009))
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
Admit it, the story with the narrator who wakes up to find he has turned into a cockroach was a bit much, except you couldn’t say so out loud without the risk of looking like an uncultured rube. Not everyone has been shy about expressing his reaction to the story. One year after the publication of The Metamorphosis, a reader admitted his befuddlement and wrote to Kafka asking for help. The Times Literary Supplement quoted from a letter written by a Dr. Wolff –
Sir, — You have made me unhappy. I purchased your Metamorphosis and gifted it to my cousin, but she could not make sense of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother: she could not explain it. Her mother gave it to another cousin, but she could not explain it either. And now they have written to me, the supposed doctor in the family. But I am at a loss. Sir! I spent months fighting the Russians in the trenches without batting an eyelash. I won’t stand idle while my reputation among my cousins goes to the devil. Only you can come to my aid. You must, since you cooked up this stew in the first place. So tell me please what my cousin ought to think of the Metamorphosis.
Source: Daniel Medin, “Decisive Days,” Times Literary Supplement (Apr. 24, 2009), at 7 (reviewing Reiner Stach, Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnis)
Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar, was the author of such post-modern gems as the novel, Rayuela (Hopscotch), novellas like El perseguidor (The Pursuer), which appears in the collection of short stories, Las armas secretas, and short stories like Las babas del diablo, in the same collection and which Antonioni adapted freely into the movie, Blow Up. In the early 1980s he developed cancer and never published again. When he died in 1984, he left a box of papers with his first wife, Aurora Bernárdez, his literary executrix.
Over Christmas 2006, Bernárdez and the critic and writer, Carles Álvarez Garriga, opened the box to discover a trove of unpublished manuscripts. The manuscripts were edited and made into a 485-page book published by Alfaguara that appears today in Argentina, during the Buenos Aires book fair, and in late May in Spain. The title of the book is Papeles inesperados (Unexpected Papers).
The Buenos Aires daily, La nación, yesterday published an excerpt from one of the recovered manuscripts. In this untitled and unfinished story, the protagonist black mails famous violinists into paying him monthly sums. How the protagonist threatens the violinists is never explained in the extant passages, though it has something to do with his aunt. In this long paragraph from the story, the protagonist complains about the violonists’ failure to pay on time, if not their resistence to paying at all [translation to English mine] –
En realidad yo debería consagrarme ya al descanso puesto que mi cuenta de banco crece a razón de 17.900 dólares mensuales, pero la mala fe de mis clientes es infinita. Tan pronto se han alejado a más de dos mil kilómetros de París, donde saben que tengo mi centro de operaciones, dejan de enviarme la suma convenida. Para gentes que ganan tanto dinero hay que convenir en que es vergonzoso, pero nunca he perdido tiempo en recriminaciones de orden moral. Los Boeing se han hecho para otra cosa, y tengo buen cuidado de refrescar personalmente la memoria de los refractarios. Estoy seguro de que Heifetz, por ejemplo, ha de tener muy presente cierta noche en el teatro de Tel Aviv, y que Francescatti no se consuela del final de su último concierto en Buenos Aires. Por su parte, sé que hacen todo lo posible por liberarse de sus obligaciones, y nunca me he reído tanto como al enterarme del consejo de guerra que celebraron el año pasado en Los Ángeles, so pretexto de la descabellada invitación de una heredera californiana atacada de melomanía megalómana. Los resultados fueron irrisorios pero inmediatos: la policía me interrogó en París sin mayor convicción. Reconocí mi calidad de aficionado, mi predilección por los instrumentos de arco, y la admiración hacia los grandes virtuosos que me mueve a recorrer el mundo para asistir a sus conciertos. Acabaron por dejarme tranquilo, aconsejándome en bien de mi salud que cambiara de diversiones; prometí hacerlo, y días después envié una nueva carta a mis clientes felicitándolos por su astucia y aconsejándoles el pago puntual de sus obligaciones. Ya por ese entonces había comprado una casa de campo en Andorra, y cuando un agente desconocido hizo volar mi departamento de París con una carga de plástico, lo celebré asistiendo a un brillante concierto de Isaac Stern en Bruselas -malogrado ligeramente hacia el final- y enviándole unas pocas líneas a la mañana siguiente. Como era previsible, Stern hizo circular mi carta entre el resto de la clientela, y me es grato reconocer que en el curso del último año casi todos ellos han cumplido como caballeros, incluso en lo que se refiere a la indemnización que exigí por daños de guerra.
* * *
In reality, I should dedicate myself to resting, given that my bank account grows to the order of 17,900 dollars monthly, but my clients’ bad faith is infinite. As soon as they have distanced themselves more than two kilometers from Paris, where they know that I have my center of operations, they stop sending me the agreed amount. For people who earn so much money, you have to agree that it is shameful, but I have never wasted my time in recriminations of a moral nature. Boeings have been made for something else and I am very careful to personally refresh the memory of the more recalcitrant ones. I am sure that Heifetz, for example, must remember a certain night in the theater in Tel Aviv. And that Francescatti does not console himself with the ending of his last concert in Buenos Aires. I know that they do everything possible to free themselves from their obligations and I have never laughed as much as when I learned about the war council they held last year in Los Angeles under the pretext of the hare-brained invitation by a California heiress suffering from megalomaniacal melomania. The results were laughable but immediate: the police questioned me in Paris without much conviction. I admitted my condition of being an afficionado, my predilection for instruments with a bow, and admiration of the great virtuosos which moves me to travel the world in order to attend their concerts. In the end, they left me alone, advising me to change hobbies, which I promised to do. And days later I mailed a new letter to my clients congratulating them for their astuteness and advising the prompt payment of their obligations. By that time, I had already bought a house in the country, in Andorra, and when an unknown agent blew up my apartment in Paris with a charge of plastic explosives, I celebrated by attending a brilliant concert by Isaac Stern in Brussels – slightly ruined toward the end – and by mailing him a few lines the next morning. As expected, Stern circulated my letter among the rest of my clientele and it gives me pleasure to recognize that during the last year, almost all of them have behaved like gentlemen, including the matter of what I demanded as indemnification for war damages.
The unfinished story ends before we know what happens to the protagonist, but I would like to think that Heifetz, Stern, and the others finally get even. Perhaps, this is one way they do it.
Early in the story, the protagonist confesses his absolute hatred of anything by Paganini — “Yo, que no puedo aguantar a Paganini” (I who can’t stomach Paganini) — which leads me to imagine the violinists counterattacking with music. I can’t resist imagining what their sortee would look and sound like, so here is Jascha Heifetz playing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. I hope you enjoy it. Rest assured that our blackmailer of a protagonist will not.
Sources: Juan Cruz, “El Julio Cortázar más inesperado: Aparece un libro con los textos que el autor de ‘Rayuela’ dejó sin publicar,” El país (May 3, 2009)(accessed May 3, 2009), Julio Cortázar, “Manuscrito hallado junto a una mano: Anticipo exclusivo de un libro con cuentos inéditos, crónicas y artículos que trazan un mapa del mundo del gran escritor argentino,” (Untitled and unfinished story) La nación (May 2, 2009)(accessed May 3, 2009), thanks to Jack Farfán Cedrón via Facebook
