Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves

Rules for Werewolves
by Kirk Lynn
(Melville House, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by contemporary writers discussing their influences continues with a contribution from Austin-based playwright Kirk Lynn, whose debut novel, Rules for Werewolves, relates the exploits of a group of teenage squatters entirely through dialogue. Critic Greil Marcus is already a fan of the book, stating: “You get caught up with these people. You take sides. And then Kirk Lynn confounds your expectations at every turn.”

Joe Brainard taught me everything I know. I Remember is the greatest American novel that isn’t one. Brainard writes hundreds of sentences over the years that begin, “I remember . . .” and then tells the truth about growing up queer in Oklahoma, becoming an avant-garde painter in New York, and everything in between. It is a litany that wakes you up in its repetition. I keep it on my desk. It’s better than the Internet for browsing.

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson is another novel that isn’t. It asks the reader to do a lot of the work along with it, which gives me a feeling of companionship. All of Anne Carson’s books are radical, but the narrative in this one was very personal and close to me, so I keep it near. How does love work? And when it stops working, what then?

David Markson is an assassin. He killed the American novel, that vampire that gets up again and again, thank god. But read Vanishing Point, or This is Not a Novel, and it’s hard to find a better companion book. Little histories of literature and art, complete in themselves, and totally different from one another. Read Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the book that seems to have taught the author how to write in his own voice. These are all novels told in the connection of ideas, one sentence urging the reader to think about its connection to the next. If there are composers who know how to use silence, David Markson is a writer who knows how to use his reader’s consciousness.

The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein
(Harcourt, Brace,
and Company, 1933)

Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the books that helped the future arrive. As with so much of the literature I adore, Gertrude Stein sees no reason to abandon humor in order to find intelligence. She sees no reason to abandon fact to write fiction. She sees no reason to let anyone else write Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. You can go as deep as your tolerance for strangeness and meditation will allow into Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre and always be rewarded, but you can’t go very deep into literature if you won’t dive into this autobiography.

Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman is the standard of avant-garde elegance. Fact: Unable to hear a lick, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing for the last year of his life. The novel takes the form of the notebooks the composer carried in which people wrote their questions and requests. The maestro spoke his answers, so his responses are not recorded in the novel. It’s a one-sided conversation between the world and a silent Beethoven, but the composer’s passion and outsize personality dominate the narrative and echo in your mind for a good while after you’ve finished the book.

Imago by Octavia E. Butler is all about transformation and becoming something you’re not, both inside and out. I think the book changed me. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but if you can get your hands on one or two real gems a year, it’s good for your full mental range—and Butler is one of the perfect mixologists, balancing deep thought and a ripping yarn.

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson is a weird little wonder that fell into my hands when my middle school teacher, Mrs. Bathke, either assigned it or smuggled it into my life. A strange virus kills off everyone on earth older than twelve and the kids have to figure out how to feed and care for themselves, including how to defend themselves from other terrible twelve-year-olds. Dystopian fiction before it was all the rage. And the author never wrote another book and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead.

Carpenter's Gothic
by William Gaddis
(Viking, 1985)

Carpenter’s Gothic could also be subtitled, for me, “the William Gaddis book I could read.” Another novel in dialogue, this one digging into the underbelly of American capitalism and colonialism. I remember falling into a trance and reading quickly. I remember reading bits of it aloud with friends. I remember there’s only one sentence of description and it’s about the leaves outside.

Emily Dickinson, especially The Gorgeous Nothings, can be an angel who responds to doubt. She did her work her way and I’m not half feral enough to get as free as she was, but some corner of the idea that form is personal and the work is its own reward can protect you. And then the work itself is so revelatory and prophetic!

And if there is one book that inspired me after I was done with Rules and made me want to get back to the prose, it’s Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Told in short, aphoristic bursts that find some middle ground between David Markson and Anton Chekhov, this book broke my heart and made want to be a better dad and husband in addition to driving me wild with envy as a writer.

And Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write! Short, sharp, human, hilarious thinking about dialogue and umbrellas and penises. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction or essays, either, but like sci-fi if you get the right one or two a year your brain will thank you. Because these are one hundred essays all jammed into one little book, it can count for a couple years’ worth of essay reading.

James Thurber:
Writings and Drawings
(Library of America, 1996)

You can convince yourself that James Thurber is totally legit because he was all over the New Yorker. But you know who might have a problem with that is the ghost of James Thurber. He didn’t have a high opinion of people who had too high an opinion of themselves. But as far as a guide for the kind of writing that doesn’t know whether it’s funny or sad, you can do no better than Thurber. And there is an openness to his formal approach to story, he captures the odd sad moment in cartoons one minute and then stretches them out to a fable and then abandons the pictures and makes short story of the captions in a sequential story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and then sometimes takes that same conceit and dips it in real sorrow like “The Whip-Poor-Will.” A great guide if you’re looking to get lost in the American voice.

Kirk Lynn is one of six co-producing artistic directors of Austin’s Rude Mechanicals theater collective and also the head of the Playwriting and Directing Area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Recent works include Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2014, and the 2014 Lincoln Center commission Stop Hitting Yourself.

Previous “Influences” posts:
Jabari Asim • Deborah Baker • Kate Christensen • Jennifer Gilmore
Lauren Groff • Lev Grossman • Alan Heathcock • Jane Hirschfield
Sara Jaffe • Alexandra Kleeman • Amitava Kumar • Adam Levin
Annie Liontas • Dawn McGuire • Dinaw Mengestu • Jim Moore
Manuel Muñoz • Maggie Nelson • Viet Thanh Nguyen
Geoffrey O’Brien • Arthur Phillips • Carl Phillips • Karen Russell
Timothy Schaffert • Philip Schultz • Mark Statman • Emma Straub
J. Courtney Sullivan • Ellen Ullman • Adam Wilson

Keith Olbermann, Rosemary Thurber, and friends gather to celebrate James Thurber

Rosemary Thurber and Keith Olbermann
backstage at the 92nd Street Y
(http://twitpic.com/5as68v)

In anticipation of Father’s Day, Keith Olbermann, former host of MSNBC’s Countdown, and Rosemary Thurber, daughter of James Thurber, gathered with friends at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night to honor their fathers by reading from and sharing stories about Thurber’s works. Olbermann recalled that it was about a year and a half ago that he discovered that his readings from James Thurber: Writings and Drawings brought his father, then hospitalized in intensive care, the most pleasure.

“You really should read Thurber on Countdown,” his father recommended. When Olbermann demurred, his father persisted. “How often have I ever suggested anything for your shows? Try it. You never know.”

A few weeks later, his father slipped into a coma but Olbermann continued to read Thurber to him and, one Friday night, he shared his father’s recommendation with Countdown viewers, and read the Thurber fable “The Peacelike Mongoose.” The next day he received an email from Thurber’s agent telling him how much Rosemary Thurber, a regular Countdown viewer, enjoyed his reading.

At last night's event Rosemary Thurber recounted how Olbermann’s broadcast solved a problem that had been troubling her. A publisher wanted permission to include “The Peacelike Mongoose” in a collection of stories for high school students, but wanted to omit the word “mongoosexual.” Hearing Olbermann read the fable unedited convinced her not to agree to the change. “You gave us the courage to say ‘print it as it is’,” she told Olbermann.

Olbermann’s readings from Thurber became a regular feature of his Friday night broadcast and caused the LOA edition to sell out immediately, leading to two hefty reprints of the book in the past year. Olbermann confirmed that when he launches the new version of Countdown on Current TV on June 20 he will continue to close his Friday night broadcasts with a reading from Thurber.

Rosemary Thurber’s mother didn’t tell her that James Thurber was her father until she was eight. On Sunday she read “The Little Girl and the Wolf,” a fable whose moral is “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.” She remembers loving the fable as a little girl: “It was like a great burden lifted from me that there was an adult out there somewhere who knew that little girls weren’t so stupid. And then to find out that it was my father. That was just excellent.” She related that her father created The Last Flower in one night. He dedicated it: “For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine.” In 2007 the Iowa University Press published a new edition of the book designed by Thurber’s granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers.

Also joining the festivities were New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin and the magazine’s cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. Mankoff noted that “as important as Thurber was to writing, he was more important to cartooning. What he did with brilliant perfection in writing he did with brilliant imperfection in cartooning . . . and he always won his own caption contest.” Mankoff credits Thurber with revolutionizing New Yorker cartoons and opening the magazine up to a new breed of cartoonists.

Thurber’s cartoons are no longer just illustrated anecdotes. They are whole worlds of fantasy that open up many, many possibilities. This style was very liberating for cartoonists. In the interplay of fantasy and reality, many things can happen that can’t happen in reality.

Trillin illustrated Thurber’s lasting legacy at The New Yorker by telling a story about his own rivalry with fellow staffer Thomas Meehan (later author of the book for the musical Annie). They both vied to get more than five “casuals” into the magazine in any one year (what were called “casuals” now appear in the section called “Shouts and Murmurs”). Neither ever succeeded. Years before, Trillin noted, Thurber had placed fifty-one “casuals” in the magazine in one year.

Also of interest:

• As a sample from the new HarperCollins audio collection of readings from Thurber, Keith Olbermann recounts how he came to read Thurber on Countdown and then reads “The Peacelike Mongoose”
• A video (YouTube) of Olbermann reading Thurber’s “A Box to Hide In”
• "The Lady on the Bookcase", a previous Story of the Week
• James Thurber: “Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• James Thurber and John Lennon: Drawing the connection, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

The “death of the book” is greatly exaggerated

In spite of the barrage of reports proclaiming the imminent death of the book (not to mention the recent troubles at Borders), sales of The Library of America’s backlist catalog are booming. For the last six months, backlist sales are up 18% over the same period last year. In fact the holiday season was so robust (and the trend seems to be continuing) that we unexpectedly ran out of a couple of dozen titles and have been scrambling to keep the reprints coming fast enough.

Here’s a list of the titles with the most impressive increases in sales compared to last year:

1. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings
2. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
3. William James: Writings 1878–1899
4. Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick
5. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
6. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations
7. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose
8. Saul Bellow: Novels 1956–1964
9. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
10. Willa Cather: Later Novels
    (tie) James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume One

A few of these are easily explained. Beginning last April, Keith Olbermann ended his Friday night broadcasts reading selections from Thurber, and the publication of Bellow’s letters almost certainly spurred renewed interest in his novels. Similarly, we’ve always seen an increase in sales of Grant’s memoirs whenever a new presidential memoir is published. But others on the list are, we confess, gratifyingly perplexing.

Related post: The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

James Thurber and John Lennon: Drawing the connection

When James Thurber died on November 2, 1961, John Lennon was playing nonstop gigs in dives in Hamburg with the Beatles, who had yet to release their first recording. They clearly had no opportunity to meet. But because December 8 marks the date in 1980 of John Lennon’s murder and of James Thurber’s birth in 1894, the two lives are annually memorialized together by circumstance.

Their actual connection may be less well known. Lennon credited Thurber with being one of the major influences on his drawing. As Lennon biographer Philip Norman wrote:

Two comic artists, one British, one American were to have a profound influence on John’s style. He loved the intricate, scratchy technique of Ronald Searle . . . And, thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for The New Yorker and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously “Thurberising” his drawings from the age of fifteen.

When In His Own Write was published in 1964, the Time reviewer got the connection:

In this startling collection of verse and prosery, Lennon has rolled Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and James Thurber into one great post-Joycean spitball. All those jellybean-lobbing, caterwauling Beatle [sic] fans are not going to understand it at all.

See for yourself. The Los Angeles Times has a photo gallery of a selected illustrations from Lennon’s books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.

You can find a selection of Thurber mammals here or you read his illustrated, whimsical assessment of his own cartoons at our Story of the Week site.

John Lennon describes “Thurberising” to Dick Cavett:



Related LOA works: James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

James Thurber: “Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar”

In the October 8, 1938, issue of The New Yorker James Thurber finds inspiration in a passage by Henry Steele Commager on the Letters of Henry Adams:

Adams was a great letter writer of a type that is now almost extinct . . . his circle of friends was larger perhaps and more distinguished than that of any other American of his generation.

In the short spoof “The Letters of James Thurber,” Thurber ponders how his own letters might compare:

James Thurber was a letter writer of the type that is now completely extinct. His circle of correspondents was perhaps no larger but it was easily more bewildered than that of any other American of his generation.... The effect of Thurber’s letters on his generation was about the same as the effect of anybody’s letters on any generation; that is to say, nil. It is only when a man’s letters are published after his death that they have any effect and this effect is usually only on literary critics. Nobody else ever reads a volume of letters and anybody who says he does is a liar.

I have been unable to find any one of Thurber’s many correspondents who saved any of his letters.... “We threw out when we moved,” people would tell me, or “We gave them to the janitor’s little boy.” Thurber gradually became aware of this on his return to America (the Final Phase) because of the embarrassed silence that always greeted him when, at his friends’ homes, he would say, “Why don’t we get out my letters to you and read them aloud?” After a painful pause the subject was quickly changed, usually by putting up the ping-pong table.

The publication in 1981 of The Selected Letters of James Thurber and in 2002 of The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber reveal Thurber actually to be, in Robert Gottlieb’s words “a compulsive correspondent as well as a sentimental one, churning out streams of letters,” as many as 1,200 a year. Most of his correspondents treasured them, although Janet Maslin notes in her review of The Thurber Letters that one of his old flames did destroy his lovestruck letters to her the night before her first child was born. Maslin clearly disagrees with the author of The New Yorker piece about the what might be gained by reading the letters of James Thurber:

With datelines ranging from "Hell, Friday" to the vacation spots frequented by Thurber and his second wife, Helen, these letters truly roam the wide world. They can—and should—be admired by anyone interested in comic genius, the lost art of great correspondence, the arcs of ambition, celebrity and age ("Our generation is melting away like snow in the sun," he wrote shortly before his death in 1961), the wonders of inspired whimsy, and the transformation of youthful enthusiasm into chronic dissatisfaction.

Of related interest:

• Thurber’s “You Could Look It Up” was a recent Story of the Week.
• Keith Olbermann reads a Thurber selection every Friday evening. Watch him read “A Box to Hide In” from the LOA collection James Thurber: Writings and Drawings.
• The 2010 Thurber prize was awarded this week to Steve Hely for his literary-pretension-skewering novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist.

Related LOA works: James Thurber: Writings and Drawings (includes "The Letters of James Thurber"); Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education