J Courtney Sullivan on whom she re-reads: W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Jane Smiley, Richard Yates

Maine by
J. Courtney Sullivan
(Knopf, 2011)

J. Courtney Sullivan, who recently published her second novel, Maine, joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry. She writes about the books she returns to for “awe and inspiration.”

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I imagined that someday I would live in New York, in an apartment straight out of a Woody Allen movie—small, but well-lit and cozy, with books piled high on every table and chair.

The end result was not far from the fantasy. Like most writers, I am a reader first. I doubt you’ll ever catch me on a Kindle: I like to have my books all around me. Even though I refuse to part with my books, I’m not likely to re-read most of them. But I do go back to a few, especially when I’m writing. Dog-eared and underlined on nearly every page, these are the ones that fill me with a sense of awe and inspiration and, okay, a little bit of jealousy. Reading any one of them can’t help but make you a better writer.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
When people ask about my favorite novel, A Thousand Acres always jumps quickly to mind. I first read it in high school, and was drawn in by the riveting, detailed descriptions of Iowa farm country, and the inner lives of the women raised there. I read it again in college, side-by-side with King Lear. Only then did I truly appreciate what a triumph of form Smiley achieves. Scene for scene, the novel is a modern day retelling of Shakespeare’s play from the daughters’ perspectives. Larger social issues like molestation, environmental concerns, and rigid gender roles get explored through the domestic lives of one family. Every page is pitch perfect.

The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
Reading great poetry is the best thing a fiction writer can do. When telling a story that spans several hundred pages, I can get caught up in plot, eager to type faster than my fingers allow. A generous helping of Auden, who chose each word and turn of phrase with such incredible care, can pare this instinct. Reading just one of his closely crafted stanzas reminds me to slow down and reexamine my sentences. I have many beloved Auden poems, and my favorites change from year to year. Some of the best, in my opinion, are “Brussels in Winter,” “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” “Music Is International,” “A Healthy Spot.” My two favorites at present: “Many Happy Returns” and “For Friends Only.”

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
This novel blows me away on so many levels. Yates evokes suburbia in the nineteen-fifties with remarkable precision and depth. Other novelists have of course done it, but none so well. Yates’s prose is at once haunting and hilarious. As he gets inside the heads of a discontented married couple and their neighbors, he brings each one’s hopes and disappointments into such sharp focus that they seem to be portraits of real people. The inner workings of the husband, Frank, in particular, are masterstrokes of genius. I admire this book for many reasons, one of which is the author’s ability to build toward a shocking, yet believable, ending. He adds layers of suspense so deftly that you never want to put it down.

The Portable Dorothy Parker
The word portable in the title is fitting. Fourteen years have passed since I received this book (as an unlikely sweet sixteen present) and it has traveled with me everywhere I’ve been since. Nearly every page is underlined and marked up, and looking it over, I can tell you at exactly which stage of my life I made each of the markings. I didn’t read the book straight through; I discovered it part by part, according to what I could handle at that point in my life. (In a way, the book is like those designer Swedish high chairs that everyone in Brooklyn now seems to have—your baby can sit in this booster seat before he’s even able to hold up his head, and then later he can convert it into a futon to use in his college dorm!)

First, as a teenager, I loved the angsty love poems. (And wrote a few bad copies myself.) In college, I’d stay up late reading Parker’s short stories. Her characters had names like Mimi and Midge, and their observations were razor sharp. In “The Lovely Leave,” a woman’s soldier husband comes home just for an afternoon and she is cross with him for leaving so soon. “I like you in black,” he says, trying to keep the peace by complimenting her dress. “At moments like this,” she replies, “I almost wish I were in it for another reason.” Later, I discovered the genius of Parker’s book reviews—her best work of all, in my opinion. There is one purple Post-it sticking out of my copy, marking Parker’s February 1959 Esquire review of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “The reader . . . has always the feeling that to know the young woman would be to find her a truly awful pest.” You must read this review immediately, if not sooner.

Reviewing for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called Sullivan’s debut novel, Commencement (2009), about the intertwined lives of four Smith College grads, “one of this year’s most inviting summer novels.” “Take Mary McCarthy’s The Group,” wrote Gloria Steinem, “add a new feminist generation striving to understand everything from themselves and their mothers to the notion of masculinity that fuels sex trafficking, and you get this generous-hearted, brave first novel.” Sullivan’s second novel, Maine, published in June, also appealed to summer readers, spending more than a month on The New York Times Best Sellers list. "I have never stayed at this cottage in Maine, or any cottage in Maine,” remarked Meg Wolitzer, “but no matter: I now feel I know what it's like being in a family that comes to the same place summer after summer, unpacking their familiar longings, slights, shorthand conversation, and ways of being together. Maine is evocative, funny, close-quartered, and highly appealing."

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Previous “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Lev Grossman, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, and Emma Straub 
• A. J. Liebling, Jean Stafford, Walker Percy, and the 1962 National Book Award for The Moviegoer (Revolutionary Road was one of the nominated books)
• W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe

Related LOA works: American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse (includes poems by W. H. Auden and Dorothy Parker); The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (includes “The Waltz” by Dorothy Parker)

A toast and a tear for Dorothy Parker, writer and poet, for her 117th birthday

Project Elegance celebrated Dorothy Parker’s birthday yesterday with a bouquet of quotes. Our favorite: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

In “A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker,” his 1944 review of The Portable Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson reflected on the close connection between Parker’s work and her era:

. . . the thing I have particularly felt is the difference between the general tone, the psychological and literary atmosphere, of the period—the twenties and the earlier thirties—when most of these pieces of Mrs. Parker’s were written, and the atmosphere of the present time. It was suddenly brought home to me how much freer people were—in their emotions, in their ideas, and in expressing themselves. In the twenties they could love, they could travel, they could stay up late at night as extravagantly as they pleased; they could think or say or write whatever seemed to them amusing or interesting. There was a good deal of irresponsibility, and a lot of money and energy wasted, and the artistic activities of the time suffered somewhat from its general vices, but it was a much more favorable climate for writing than the period we are in now.

And on Parker in particular:

When one has bought Dorothy Parker . . . one has really got a book. She is not Emily Bronte or Jane Austen, but she has been at some pains to write well, and she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed.

Laurence Senelick echoed Wilson in his introduction to “The Jest,” his selection of one of Parker's drama reviews from Vanity Fair for The American Stage:

In the age of disillusionment that followed the Great War, the wisecrack best conveyed the fashion for cynicism. No wonder that the “Round Table” at the Algonquin Hotel, the journalists’ luncheon club she frequented with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Woolcott, and George S. Kaufman, was commonly known as the Vicious Circle. The bon mots of these mauvais langues—such as the barb that Katherine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”—were made public in their columns the next day.

Parker would not have been happy being characterized as a wisecracker, since she once wrote: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

The Dorothy Parker Society website contains a great deal of material about Parker’s life and work. The society has a newsletter; it conducts an Algonquin Round Table walking tour, and the site has a page filled with audio of Parker reading her poems (requires RealPlayer).

Related LOA works: Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays of the 1930s and 1940s; The American Stage: Writings on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

After what he called “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov finished writing Lolita in December 1953 and began submitting it to publishers. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So went one of the many rejection letters. Five leading publishers—Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking—all turned it down.

That was when Nabokov’s European agent, Doussia Ergaz, recommended Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, publisher of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Nabokov was then teaching Russian Studies at Cornell and feared he would be fired unless the book was published under a pseudonym. Girodias would publish it, but only with Nabokov’s name as author. Nabokov agreed but was wary, as he expressed in a letter in July 1955: “You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succès de scandale would distress me.”

Girodias printed 5,000 copies of Lolita in English in September 1955. It sold mostly to English tourists and did not receive any critical attention until, in an interview with the London Times, Graham Greene named it one of the three best novels of 1955. This prompted John Gordon of the Sunday Express to order a copy and to denounce it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The ensuing brouhaha (Gordon pointed out that Greene had been sued by Shirley Temple “for having said the little girl made her living out of displaying her thighs for the delectation of middle-aged gentlemen”) made Lolita into an international sensation. Responding to Gordon’s attack in Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote:

I cannot regard it as pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind. It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls ... an anguished book, but sometimes wildly funny, as in the saga of his travels across and around the United States with her.... [Nabokov’s] command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—alright then—a great book.

The New York Public Library “Sessions” pages, edited by Rodney Phillips and Sarah Funke, recount the dramatic story of the American publication:

Though copies of the Girodias edition were making it into the United States, Nabokov still wished for an American edition. Jason Epstein, then an editor at Doubleday, hoped to convince Doubleday's president, Douglas Black, to take the novel, by playing upon Black's desire to refight the court battle he had recently lost over Edmund Wilson’s The Memoirs of Hecate County. In an attempt to gain ground, Epstein arranged for an excerpt (about a third of the novel) to appear in Doubleday's June 1957 Anchor Review, with critical praise from Partisan Review editor F.W. Dupee. The Anchor volume featured Nabokov’s specially written explanation of the genesis of the novel and his defense of it on the grounds of “aesthetic bliss”: “On a Book Entitled Lolita.”

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nabokov endured delays and denials by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and even Putnam’s. He settled on the small independent publisher Ivan Obolensky, but when his offer, too, fell through, Putnam’s made good on an earlier proposal, and went into production.

On publication day [August 18], Putnam’s president, Walter Minton, sent a congratulatory telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS ON PUBLICATION DAY.

By the end of the day, 2,600 orders had been received.

The “blast” referred to by Minton was Orville Prescott's pan, although Elizabeth Janeway's review that had appeared the previous day in the Sunday Times was a rave. Lolita would go on to be the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 in its first three weeks.

In a 1964 interview for Life Magazine, Jane Howard asked Nabokov, “which of your writings has pleased you most?”

I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Related LOA works: Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 (includes the screenplay Nabokov wrote for the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film. It differs substantially from the final film.)

Nathanael West as online muse

In his brief life Nathanael West wrote four darkly comic novels, two of them acclaimed masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts, a devastating portrait of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ sufferings, and The Day of the Locusts, an apocalyptic vision of the underside of the Hollywood dream. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in 1997 Virginia Heffernan wrote “[West] seems to have become a writer, like Frank Norris or Djuna Barnes, whose work is periodically 'revived,' appreciated, and explained, and then returned to the hands of more stalwart fans.” Based on recent evidence a sustained revival of Nathanael West seems to be at hand.

For one, West today has his own Twitter account. Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, a dual biography of West and his wife, hosts both the Twitter account (in West's voice) and http://www.nathanaelwest.com/, a site devoted in equal parts to West, McKenney, and the book, and featuring a good deal of trivia and media about the couple.

Joe Woodward’s blog, The Nathanael West Project, chronicles on an almost daily basis his writing of a biography of West. Last week he posted a lengthy rumination for 3:AM Magazine, which included a description of the fateful last dinner party at West’s home in North Hollywood on Friday, December 13, 1940. That night West and McKenney hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham, Dorothy Parker, the screenwriters Albert and Frances Hackett, and the artist Hilaire Hiler.

No one at the party that night could have known it, but it was the last time any of them would see F. Scott Fitzgerald or Nathanael West alive. Fitzgerald would never finish The Last Tycoon and never see the whole of his Pat Hobby short story cycle published. And West, he would never get beyond the start of that fifth novel. The following weekend they would both be gone. Scott would die at the age of 44, the following Saturday, of a heart attack while reading the Princeton alumni magazine, and West, at 37, and his new wife Eileen, at 27, would die in a horrific car accident in the middle of the California desert.

A 1932 editorial in Americana, the short-lived magazine West co-edited with the Dadaist George Grosz, proclaimed. “We are the laughing morticians of the present.” This may help explain why West’s Wikipedia entry is one of the few with a link to Findagrave, a website where visitors can locate the graves of more than 4,000 writers and commemorate them with virtual flowers and comments.

On a livelier note, many clips are surfacing online of West’s screenwriting efforts, giving glimpses of his mordant style. Fans of Lost may enjoy the trailer for one of West’s last screenplays, Five Came Back (1939). Lucille Ball’s badinage in this clip from the same movie has a Westian flair. And Peter Lorre seems the perfect vehicle for West’s offhanded menace in Stranger on the Third Floor.

Related LOA works: Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings; Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology