Viet Thanh Nguyen: We still live in Ralph Ellison’s moment

The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
(Grove Press, 2015)

Our newly-relaunched series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer was recently published to wide acclaim. Here, Nguyen discusses his novel’s debt to Ralph Ellison.

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” This is the first line of my novel, The Sympathizer, and in it you can hear the echo of another novel. “I am an invisible man,” Ralph Ellison wrote. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.” A few lines later in my first paragraph, I continue to evoke Invisible Man with this sentence: “I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such.”

These references constitute part of my homage to Ellison, but my greatest gesture of respect has been to take his surname for my son’s first name. Most people do not get the allusion, never having read Ellison’s book. For those that do get it, the name functions as a password. You and I, we believe in the power of the word, of the book, of literature.

I feel a debt to Ellison because Invisible Man performs the essential maneuver that I hope marks my own aesthetic, which is the treatment of marginalized experience as universal experience. He foreshadowed Toni Morrison, who unapologetically declares her intentions to write about Black people for Black people. Everyone else can listen in and follow along.

In Ellison’s case, if there was not quite the same degree of defiance, perhaps he made that defiance possible. He himself followed on W.E.B. Du Bois’s insight in The Souls of Black Folk that the Negro was a person of double-consciousness, always seeing himself through his own eyes and the eyes of others. Is there a better definition of modern consciousness? This one has been routed through Black history, injury, and perception, as well as the crucial conviction that the other side of Old World Enlightenment was New World slavery and colonialism. This dark side, what scholar Paul Gilroy memorably calls the Black Atlantic, produced equally rich insight from the depths of slave ships and the plantation system’s concentration camps. Ellison riffed on double-consciousness to arrive at the sense that a Black man was always invisible to white people—until the moment when he was too visible.

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
(Random House, 1952)

I am not Black but I have felt a small degree of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility, occasioned by a parallel history of war and anti-Asian racism. I have sat at a most genial dinner of rich, powerful, old white alum of an Ivy League university where, apropos of nothing, except for the fact that I was the sole Asian American at the table—indeed, in the entire dining room—a ninety-six-year-old executive who flew in bombers during the Pacific War said that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was the right thing to do. The unprovoked warning was clear, not that I needed it. I had already written the scene in my novel where a Cold War pundit tells my narrator exactly the same thing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as he, too, sat at dinner, in close quarters “with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”

So, in a world where apocalypse exists as more than a mad threat, at least for people of darker shade, what is the function of fiction? For Ellison, writing during the Atomic Age and the Cold War, the novel as form was a “raft of hope.” I agree, as any writer probably will, but I also differ. A raft is only large enough for one person, perhaps two, which is why the invisible man, after being stung by the failure of his revolution, and after retreating to a hole, eventually emerges by himself. My narrator, too, confronts the failure of his revolution, and he, too, goes into a kind of a hole. But when he emerges, he finds himself not on a raft but on a boat, and not by himself but among a crowd of the revolution’s castoffs. For him, the antidote to a failed revolution is not individualism, which appeals so much to Americans, but a doubling of faith—perhaps foolish faith—in the solidarity and collectivism that is a part of both revolution and democracy.

Although I end my novel by revising Ellison, I am nevertheless invoking him. His insights remain, for the nightmare from which his invisible man was struggling to awaken continues today, when it remains necessary to say that Black Lives Matter. We still live in Ellison’s moment.

Born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune. The Sympathizer was called “remarkable” and “gripping” in the New York Times Book Review by Philip Caputo, who also wrote that Nguyen’s depiction of his double-agent narrator “compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook

Last week we shared details of our first-ever audiobook: The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, a 1946 novel included in our upcoming two-volume anthology Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

Fools’ Gold by
Dolores Hitchens
(Doubleday, 1958)

Today we’re equally excited to give a sneak preview of our second audiobook, Fools’ Gold (1958) by Dolores Hitchens, another title in the Women Crime Writers collection. The story of two juvenile delinquents fresh out of lockup and a sheltered young orphan girl who hatch a robbery scheme that goes badly astray, Fools’ Gold is perhaps best known today as the inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Bande À Part (Band of Outsiders).

A 2011 review by Dan Stumpf on the MysteryFile blog suggests the novel is ripe for reappraisal: Stumpf calls it “a nasty piece of work. . . . quite well done. [Hitchens] has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.”

Scott Brick recording Fools’ Gold
in Los Angeles, June 2015.

Longtime audiobook producer Patti Pirooz, who is also handling The Library of America’s Horizontal Man audiobook, is shepherding Fools’ Gold through production in Los Angeles. Behind the microphone is Scott Brick, a writer, actor, and veteran audiobook narrator with more than 600 titles to his credit, ranging from bestsellers like Moneyball and The Bourne Identity to classics like In Cold Blood and Light in August. Publishers Weekly named Brick its “Narrator of the Year” in 2007, and he has won two Audies from the Audio Publishers Association and over fifty Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine for his work as a reader.

Want to hear a sample of the narrating chops that have made Brick so lauded in his field? Enjoy a brief excerpt of his Fools’ Gold reading via the audio player embedded below.



Watch Reader’s Almanac in the coming months for further information about our Fools’ Gold audiobook and Women Crime Writers, both of which will be released in September.

Related post:
Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Maggie Nelson: American classics that influenced the writing of The Argonauts

The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
(Graywolf Press, 2015)

For the relaunch of our series of blog posts by contemporary fiction writers, essayists, poets, and historians, we reached out to Maggie Nelson to learn what classic works of American writing might have influenced her critically acclaimed new memoir The Argonauts.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. If you’re looking for an example of how to move between personal anecdote, trenchant political analysis, and urgent spiritual/ontological rumination, I doubt anyone bests Baldwin. His account of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad was, is, endlessly instructive to me, not only for its use of an encounter as a springboard for reflection, but also for Baldwin’s skill in saying exactly what he wants and needs to say without bending under the pressures of imagined readerships, some of whom might stand all too ready to misuse his critique. (I thought about this issue a lot when trying to figure out how to weight various critiques in The Argonauts.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings. People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. (Nietzsche thought so too—how’s that for mind-blowing.)

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. First published in 1981, this collection feels fresh, relevant, and necessary every time I pick it up. Whenever people complain to me about the so-called “ivory towerness” of theory, I advise them to revisit the “theory in the flesh” articulated in these pages, which proves how some—perhaps most—people who come to analyze the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality do so out of a need to make livable lives, and sometimes to survive.

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. I read this book when it came out in 1991. I was eighteen, and had just come of age in San Francisco, a city ravaged by AIDS, but I hardly knew what the hell had happened, what was happening. This book helped me to understand everything—about AIDS, about the brutality of normalcy, about how rage might be mobilized to sublime effect in writing, about queerness, about mortality, about friendship, about how hallucinogenic, poetic accounts of roadside encounters might be paired with utterly fierce condemnations of this country’s politics, and so much more.

Against Interpretation
by Susan Sontag
(Dell, 1966)

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Whenever I go back to my heavily annotated copy of Against Interpretation, I am appalled at how much of my thinking, and even my sentences, seem to me cribbed from Sontag. I guess I read Against Interpretation—an American classic of criticism if there ever was one—at a particularly molten moment in my development, when I was trying to figure out how to combine art and literary criticism, philosophy, and a certain speed or heat in my writing style. Sontag was so clearly already driving that car. I got in, and the rest is history.

Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s and Other Essays. Koestenbaum was my teacher once, and I remember very clearly his telling me: You have to get yourself to say upfront the unspeakable, indefensible thing; after that, you can spend the rest of the piece backpedaling or devoting yourself to nuance. But at least you’ve said it. I am endlessly in thrall to his mastery of this skill: his unsurpassable talent for assertion—hilarious, provocative, or perverse assertion—coupled with an appetite for / apprehension of nuance. I am edified by the range, verve, experiment, and energy of this collection, which makes me think there is a version of “American letters” that I could get behind.

Maggie Nelson's previous books include several volumes of poetry in addition to The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), a work of cultural criticism named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. The Argonauts—a book whose form tests the boundaries of genre at the same time its content pushes against traditional gender definitions—has been called “vibrant, probing, and, most of all, outstanding” by NPR, and “a beautiful, passionate, and shatteringly intelligent meditation on what it means not to accept binaries” by the Chicago Tribune. Nelson lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Ross Macdonald, perpetual stranger in his native California

Tom Nolan is the editor of The Library of America’s new title Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s. In this, the second of three Reader’s Almanac exclusives about Macdonald’s life and work, he relates the biographical circumstances that help explain why Macdonald was able to regard California, the state in which he was born, with both the knowingness of a local and the detachment of an outsider.

(Read the first post in Nolan‘s series here.)

Readers around the globe found an imaginative vision of Southern California in the fiction of Ross Macdonald. But Macdonald himself—by birth Kenneth Millar—was raised far from the promised glow of the Golden State, up north in frigid Canada. The bright but impoverished son of a fractured family, young Kennie was shunted across four provinces from one relative to another. His mother, however, continued to remind him that he’d been born near San Francisco (in Los Gatos, also at one time the home of John Steinbeck) and instilled in him the notion that he “belonged” in California. It took thirty years for this pauper-prince to find his way back (with a wife and child) to his state of origin. Once there, of course, he was a stranger in a strange land.

The Drowning Pool by
[John] Ross Macdonald
(Knopf, 1950)

In Santa Barbara, where the Millars settled at once and for good, he felt especially out of place: a still far-from-wealthy man in a town of many millionaires, a bookish PhD. candidate and strict moralist in a city rife with hedonists. (Macdonald skewered the sexual preoccupations and artistic pretensions of certain Santa Barbarans in his 1950 novel The Drowning Pool.) Ninety miles to the south was Hollywood, with its low-hanging poisoned fruit. Visible from his backyard was a mountain range which for years seemed to Millar like the Great Wall of China, cutting him off from the main social and intellectual currents of American life.

But Ross Macdonald was in a long tradition of California chroniclers from elsewhere: Ambrose Bierce (Ohio), Nathanael West (New York), John Fante (Colorado), James M. Cain (Maryland), Raymond Chandler (Illinois)—outsiders who observed with a fresh and often wary eye. As a beginning Southland novelist, Macdonald was drawn in his early books to the lurid moving targets that had already caught the eyes of his 1930s and ’40s predecessors: the Sunset Strip gangsters (Danny Dowser, the mobster in The Way Some People Die, seems a caricature of Mickey Cohen, the L.A. hood who became a ’50s celebrity), the Hollywood dream factories (see The Barbarous Coast), the self-serving faux-sophistication of well-to-do adulterers, and the cruder entertainments of the lower classes.

The Barbarous Coast
by Ross Macdonald
(Knopf, 1956)

Macdonald’s vision widened and deepened as he wrote through the 1950s and ’60s, and as California society changed. Crass hoodlums faded from public view, and Macdonald’s examination of Southern California’s sins focused inward: on dysfunctional families, the generation gap, and the timeless greeds of dubious characters gravitating to the Western edge of the country to reinvent themselves and start anew.

Con artists posed as aristocrats. New money hid its source. Expectant beneficiaries mortgaged their souls in anticipation of future wealth. Embittered spouses choked on private resentments. Abused children smashed out at hypocrisy through sex, drugs, violence. And the past threatened to reveal sordid and dangerous secrets: a hushed-up first marriage, an ex-con sibling, a skeleton in the desert.

As Ross Macdonald came into his mature themes and style throughout the ’60s, he was recognized not just as a superior detective novelist but as a significant regional (hence national) author. Canadian Kenneth Millar, like many Golden State emigrants, and many of the characters he wrote of, had reinvented himself—as the California-American Ross Macdonald.

In the process, he Canadianized his new home in print. He held its natives to a higher moral standard than they might aspire to, described the physical landscape and its creatures with the sensibility of one raised in a land that valued such beauty, and expressed profound awareness of how the past irrevocably influenced the present: a strong theme in contemporary Canadian fiction (from Margaret Laurence to Robertson Davies to Margaret Atwood) as much as in the post-hard-boiled novels of Ross Macdonald.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Los Gatos as John Steinbeck’s birthplace. In fact, Steinbeck was born in Salinas; he moved with his wife to Los Gatos (now Monte Sereno) in the mid-1930s.

Video: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on “an implicit political victory for our people”

In New York City last week, Library of America Board member Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gave a rousing account of his work as Director of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University during which he told a capacity crowd at the Century Association, “I think that the last barrier for African-Americans to cross in terms of victory over racism will be the barrier of intellectual prejudice—the belief that somehow we are naturally inferior.”


Video: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on May 26, 2015 (5:05)

Gates’s remarks came in a conversation with businessman and investor Glenn Hutchins, who supports the Center through his Hutchins Family Foundation. The May 26 program was a co-presentation of The Library of America and The Hutchins Center.

Prompted by Hutchins, Gates looked back to the late 1960s, when elite universities in the U.S. first began to acknowledge the need for African American studies as a discipline. He explained, however, that at the time he and many of his peers “didn’t know what it meant create a real academic department,” and that a number of the initial African American studies programs “were embarrassments, really, academically. They were created so the students would not blow up the library or burn it down.”

For that reason, Gates continued, he had specific ambitions when Harvard University recruited him to rebuild what was then called the Department of Afro-American Studies in 1991.

“To me, creating an academic entity at one of the world’s greatest institutions, full of brilliant people—white and black, gay and straight, American, European, African, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, wherever they came from—built on the most sound and rigorous academic principles, would be an implicit political victory for our people.

“And that’s what I set out to do.”

Watch the complete program on The Library of America’s YouTube channel.

Related post:
Photo Gallery: Capacity crowd joins Library of America for Henry Louis Gates, Glenn Hutchins talk

Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Back in mid-May, Library of America staff members paid a visit to Merlin Studios in New York City for a behind-the-scenes look at an exciting new project: the recording of The Library of America's first audiobook.

The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis,
collected in the forthcoming anthology
Women Crime Writers: Eight
Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

The work in question is The Horizontal Man, a 1946 novel by Helen Eustis (1916–2015) that will be included in Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, a two-volume set coming from The Library of America this fall. (Click here for a list of other titles in the anthology.)

Centered on the murder of a philandering professor at a small Connecticut women’s college, The Horizontal Man allegedly drew on Eustis's own experiences as an undergraduate at Smith College. It won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel, and the eminent scholar and mystery-suspense aficionado Jacques Barzun named it one of the Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900–1950 in a ranking he published with Wendell Hertig Taylor in 1976.

Actress Barbara Rosenblat.

The Library of America is drawing on veteran talent for its initial foray into audiobooks. Patti Pirooz, the former publisher of audiobooks at Penguin, is producing The Horizontal Man, and the reader is Barbara Rosenblat, a veteran of stage, film, and TV who is perhaps best known for her role as Miss Rosa on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. What fans of Rosenblat's work on Orange may not know is that she has also been hailed as "the Meryl Streep of audiobooks"—i.e., a versatile and widely acclaimed reader whose hundreds of credits range from Bridget Jones to classics and numerous mystery series.

Watch Reader's Almanac in the months ahead for more information about Women Crime Writers and our Horizontal Man audiobook, both of which will be released in September.

Photo Gallery: Capacity crowd joins Library of America for Henry Louis Gates, Glenn Hutchins talk

An enthusiastic and engaged crowd turned out last Tuesday, May 26, for a wide-ranging conversation between public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and businessman and investor Glenn Hutchins at The Century Association in New York City. The program was a co-presentation by The Library of America and The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The editor of The Library of America's Frederick Douglass volume, co-editor of Slave Narratives, and a member of its Board of Directors since 1997, Gates is the Director of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. In his remarks Gates recounted the Center’s modest beginnings nearly a quarter-century ago and his subsequent collaborations with Hutchins, who supports the Center through his Hutchins Family Foundation.

After Gates described his hope that the Center will expand from its base in the arts and social sciences into public policy, he and Hutchins led the audience through a spirited discussion of questions surrounding affirmative action and access to higher education, among other topics.

Watch this space for highlights and a complete video of the program, and in the meantime, enjoy the following photo gallery featuring Library of America friends and family who came out for a stimulating evening.

All photos © Star Black.

Library of America Trustee Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and Glenn Hutchins at The Century Association
in New York City on May 26, 2015.

Library of America Fellow Claudia Plottel and Library of America
Board Chair-elect Elizabeth W. Smith.

Anne Metrailler, Metropolitan Museum of Art President
Emily Rafferty, Library of America President Cheryl Hurley,
and Sheila Martin.

Hutchins Center National Advisory Board members Bennett Ashley (L)
and Shahara Ahmad-Llewellyn (R) with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (C).

Library of America Trustee Candace Wainwright and
Library of America Fellows Andrea Stillman and William Buice.

Library of America supporter Janice Bennett and
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.

Hutchins Center National Advisory Board member Lewis P. Jones III
and Library of America Trustee Emme Deland.

Library of America Publisher Max Rudin
and author Susan Cheever.

Authors Robert and Ina Caro.

Rose Styron and newly-elected Library of America
Trustee Joanne Freeman.

Max Rudin (lower R) introducing the program on May 26, 2015.

Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to and respected athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting

The Library of America’s recent title The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz collects thirty-eight pieces by sports journalist W. C. Heinz (1915–2008), whose work is distinguished by its timeless human interest and vivid colloquial style.

Bill Littlefield, the book’s editor, met Heinz in 2001, and has attested to being “grateful ever since” for the friendship that developed between them. In the following interview, he discusses why Heinz’s writing has endured and how Heinz was able to create such compelling portraits of iconic athletes like Sugar Ray Robinson and Gordie Howe alongside others who were markedly less successful. Littlefield has been the host of National Public Radio’s weekly sports magazine Only A Game since 1993 and has written commentaries for NPR and Boston’s WBUR-FM for over thirty years. His seven books include two novels, Prospect and The Circus in the Woods, and the 2014 collection of sports verse Take Me Out.

In the earliest pieces in The Top of His Game, from 1947, Heinz seems already fully formed as a writer. Was his literary apprenticeship the reporting he did in World War II, or was there a period even before that in which he learned his craft?

The work Bill did as a war correspondent was certainly important to his development as a writer. I imagine he learned from the men and boys of those days the importance of getting their stories right. And he learned to work very hard at doing that. I’m sure that carried over into his work when he got home and had the opportunity to write about sports.

Heinz profiled many successful, even legendary sports figures, but much of his best work shows an affinity for what today we might call “beautiful losers”—strivers who don’t quite make it. Can you speculate a little as to where this special empathy or attraction of his might have come from?

Bill knew that everybody loses. Undefeated fighters lose. They grow old. They suffer the consequences of the profession. The glorious moments athletes provide us are glorious in part because they are fleeting. But Bill was especially drawn to the athletes he recognized as true professionals—those who brought not only talent but intelligence, determination, and integrity to what they were doing, whether or not they became champions. He respected boxers who listened and learned. The professionals.

I think his affinity for Pete Reiser, for example, came in part from the recognition that Reiser couldn’t have played baseball any other way. He didn’t run into outfield walls because he wanted to. That was the only way he could play the game, and it was brave and sad at the same time. The loss was built into the glory.

Heinz can make choices that initially might seem counterintuitive, such as his decision, in the long boxing piece “The Day of the Fight,” not to get to the match itself until the startling final paragraph. Did he have certain characteristic strategies in his writing?

I don’t know about characteristic “strategies.” It feels to me as if Bill’s constant strategy was to listen carefully and to see what there was to see. Sometimes he heard and saw things others missed until he pointed them out.

Along those lines: what trait do you most admire about Heinz as a writer?

Bill had great respect for the people about whom he wrote. So much writing about sports is full of smart-alecky asides and sarcasm or derision. Bill didn’t work that way. He cared about getting each story right, and when you read his work, you feel as if he cared not only about that responsibility, but about the people. He liked some of them more than others, certainly, and he didn’t entirely trust some of them, but he always honored them with his attention.

You were already familiar with Heinz’s work and career well before beginning to work on this book. As you sifted through the scrapbooks of his writing that Gayl Heinz, his daughter, lent you, were there any particular surprises—facets of Heinz’s talent you hadn’t come across before, for instance?

Jeff MacGregor said it best. He went through the same scrapbooks for his wonderful Sports Illustrated profile of Bill, and Jeff said, “There aren’t any bad ones.” I agree.

Is there a piece here that readers may find surprising?

The column Bill wrote about “Toughie” Brasuhn, Queen of the Roller Derby. I don’t think most of Bill’s readers will recall that one, but I was delighted to see it. Bill was curious. And he wasn’t reluctant to step away from the gym or the race track or the ball field when something like the roller derby came to town. I really like that column.

The period covered in The Top of His Game, 1947 to 1979, arguably coincides with the zenith of print journalism in this country. Given your own background, what’s the difference between a great print piece and a great TV or radio piece?

I don’t know how to talk about TV pieces in that context, because to such a great extent TV is obviously about pictures. That’s not to say that some of the people writing for television aren’t excellent writers . . . only that they know they can depend on images for a lot of the impact they’re trying to create. But radio is about words, just as obviously, and a good story told well on the radio is not so different from a good story told well in print, except that often radio gives you less time to get the job done. It’s been great to see some of the websites bring back what’s being called “long-form” journalism, the form in which Heinz was the master, because most of the magazines in which that work used to appear are long gone.

Your introduction recounts an episode in which, without having taken any notes, Heinz was able to report “word for word” on a meeting with boxing manager Jack Hurley at Stillman’s Gym. Is it possible today’s reliance on tape recorders and video cameras might make it harder for new writers like W. C. Heinz to emerge?

Several people who have read the introduction have commented on that story. Bill told me that of course he couldn’t reproduce “word for word” what Jack Hurley had said during that afternoon. What he could do was give his readers the cadence of Hurley’s voice, and a sense of his wit, by using some of the words and expressions Hurley favored. Bill could recreate what he’d heard in a smaller space—the space afforded him in a newspaper column.

Some people today wouldn’t be comfortable with that process. I think what makes the work harder for journalists today is that the athletes and the people around them are so careful about their images. A lot of them don’t have much to say, at least while the digital recorders are running or the cameras are rolling or the notebooks are out. And probably most writers now—like most writers in any time—are less patient than Bill was, and less trustworthy, too.

A lot of readers today may be fascinated to learn that in 1968 Heinz co-wrote, under a pseudonym, the novel that inspired the film and TV show M*A*S*H, after his two well-received novels The Professional and The Surgeon. Are there connections to be drawn between his fiction and his sportswriting?

The only novel about which Bill and I spoke at any length was The Professional. Bill put the qualities he’d learned to respect in fighters and in at least one trainer into the characters in The Professional. He was proud of what a good book it is, and proud of the integrity with which he’d written it. I won’t say any more about it, in case some of the people reading this haven’t yet read the novel. I don’t want to spoil it for them.

Audio and text selection: Read the W. C. Heinz classic “Death of a Race Horse” at The Library of America’s Story of the Week website and listen to Bill Littlefield reading the selection in streaming audio.

Ross Macdonald: “Chandler tried to kill me”

Tom Nolan is the editor of The Library of America’s new title Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s. Here, in the first of three exclusive Reader’s Almanac posts about Macdonald’s life and work, he explores the relationships among the “Holy Trinity” of the hardboiled detective novel—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Macdonald—and the complicated dynamics of literary succession.

Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald.

L to R: The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, 1931);
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (Knopf, 1939);
The Moving Target by [John] Ross Macdonald (Knopf, 1949).

That triple-play combo, first suggested by critic Anthony Boucher in the 1950s, had become common parlance by the mid-’70s. It suggests a “Holy Trinity” of literary succession, with Dashiell Hammett as the chief originator of the hardboiled detective novel, Raymond Chandler as the genre’s romantic popularizer, and Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) realizing its moral, psychological, and lyrical fulfillment.

Millar/Macdonald had been greatly influenced as an artist by those two illustrious forebears—one of whom would remain a lifelong inspiration, and the other a writer the mere mention of whose name might throw Millar into a rage.

Hammett made his mark on the future Ross Macdonald circa 1931, when Kenneth Millar was an angry but ambitious teenager in Kitchener, Ontario, who spent half his free time in the public library reading everything from Heraclitus to H. L. Mencken to Agatha Christie, and the other half in McCallum’s Barber Shop, Tobacco Store, and Pool Hall. McCallum’s had a rental library, and it was there that Ken Millar found and read, in a single afternoon, a Hammett novel, probably The Glass Key. It was unlike any book (let alone “mystery”) that he’d come across in the town’s official library.

“I lived in a very self-righteous city when I was going to high school,” Millar told interviewer William Gottlieb in 1973, “a self-righteous city where the slot machine racket was roaring and drawing in thousands of dollars, and corrupting the police force. . . . And this was never mentioned. I didn’t know that it could be mentioned in fiction until . . . I started to read Dashiell Hammett.”

Late in life, Macdonald recalled the electrifying effect that Hammett novel had on him in the tobacco-store rental-library: “Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me. . . . For the first time . . . I was consciously experiencing in my own sensibility the direct meeting of art and contemporary actuality.” Here was the sort of fiction Ken Millar someday hoped to write.

Life intervened. Millar went to college, graduated, married, became a father, a high-school teacher, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan before he came upon his next great crime-fiction influence: Raymond Chandler, who had taken Hammett’s hard-boiled model and (much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had done with the ratiocinative detective story invented by Edgar Allan Poe) adapted it to his own vivid purposes in books that set the style for a new generation.

Millar was liberated by Chandler’s vivacious prose style, which seemed leagues livelier than anything else in American letters. Chandler “wrote like a slumming angel,” Macdonald would testify, “and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”

In his first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949), Macdonald made free use of the traditions he’d inherited. As in the debut Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the rich client is paralyzed; but in Target, it’s a youngish she and not an aged he, and she isn’t dying and charming but full of a cynical life-force. Archer cracks wise, in the Hammett-Chandler mode, but his patter often sounds more like Stephen Leacock or Robert Benchley than Spade or Marlowe. Macdonald from the start was appropriating the p.i. foundation to build something of his own.

But Raymond Chandler didn’t like what he read when critic James Sandoe (a crucial early Chandler booster) brought The Moving Target to his attention. He was already miffed at the many imitators he’d engendered in the past decade, and Macdonald became a special target. Chandler went out of his way to disparage Lew Archer’s creator in letters to Sandoe, to fellow writer James T. Fox, and to an influential Chicago bookseller. The mystery community in the 1950s was a tight-knit group, so it’s likely Millar knew about the old master’s mean-spirited missives. Once the posthumous Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962) was published, with its inclusion of Chandler’s 1949 letter to Sandoe knocking Macdonald’s prose (“The simile that does not quite come off . . . pretentiousness in the phrasing . . . stylistic misuse of language . . . a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion”), the whole world could read all about it.

“Chandler tried to kill me”: that was Millar’s melodramatic description of the older man’s behavior towards him at the outset of his career.

Pocket Books edition of
The Moving Target (1949)
by [John] Ross Macdonald

Even while Chandler was grumbling about Macdonald, Pocket Books—Macdonald’s (and Chandler’s) paperback publisher at the time—complained that Macdonald was wandering too far from established hard-boiled templates, and went as far as to suggest to Alfred Knopf that someone should rewrite Millar’s texts to make them more like Chandler’s.

The situation came to a head in Millar’s extraordinary 1952 letter to Knopf in which he declared his independence from Chandler’s near-Manichean morality and outlined his own map for future work: “I can’t accept Chandler’s vision of good and evil. It is conventional to the point of occasional old-maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism . . . and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate. . . . [I]t would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery.”

While distancing himself from Raymond Chandler, though, Macdonald continued to learn from and admire Dashiell Hammett, developing certain Hammett-like devices in distinctive ways.

As an ex-Pinkerton detective, Hammett was hyper-alert to people’s physical behavior: a professional investigator is always looking for “the tell”—the furtive glance, the twitch of the lip, the hesitation that indicates truth or falsehood. Hammett specialized in describing people under stress, and Macdonald brought this physiological scrutiny to a near-poetic level in his career-long use of “psychological clues.”

Another Hammett technique Macdonald put to his own good use was the deadpan description of the contents of a given person’s wallet, luggage, or furnishings. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade notes several things found on Joel Cairo’s person: they reveal not only the would-be-client’s recent activities but the elements of a pocket biography. Compare that collage trouvé with what Lew Archer discerns in the personal effects at Lance Leonard’s house in The Barbarous Coast, the poignant souvenirs of Keith Dalling’s existence in The Way Some People Die, the shopworn possessions of the seedy Pat Reavis in The Drowning Pool—each assemblage tracing the trajectory of an entire life.

James M. Cain was another hard-boiled writer admired by Millar. At his peak, he thought, Cain set the most brisk narrative pace he’d ever seen. But Macdonald of course loved and learned from the work of American non-genre authors as well. Two of his favorites were F. Scott Fitzgerald—plot aspects of The Great Gatsby can be found in Macdonald’s The Galton Case and Black Money—and William Faulkner, whose structural technique much impressed Macdonald (he said of Faulkner’s keeping Popeye’s story until the very end of Sanctuary: “That’s control”), and whose gothic-realist streak (exemplified in the final sentence of his chilling story “A Rose for Emily”) had a strong influence on Macdonald’s own: note the almost as startling last-sentence revelation of The Chill.

Millar remained a devoted reader all his life and in latter years wrote generous jacket blurbs for a number of novice authors, including Roger Simon, Michael Z. Lewin, Michael Collins, Leonard Gardner, Dick Francis, William McIlvanney, and George V. Higgins. He also unofficially edited several nonfiction and fiction works by friends and acquaintances and mentored many apprentice and beginning writers. “He did tremendous favors,” said his friend Jerre Lloyd. “And there wasn’t anything selfish in it; he kept quiet about it. But I can’t emphasize too much the amount of good that he did. I think the reason was that he’d been so badly treated himself by Raymond Chandler. . . . [H]e thought Chandler had been gratuitously negative, and he was anxious not to do that to anyone else.”

Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition

Now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the exhibition One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is a rare opportunity to see a landmark of twentieth-century American art in its entire, original form. Conceived in 1939 and completed two years later, Lawrence’s Migration Series consists of sixty numbered tempera paintings, each measuring 18 x 12 inches, in which the young Harlem-based artist documented the huge population shift that brought hundreds of thousands of his fellow African Americans from the rural American South to the urban, industrialized North over the preceding quarter-century.

Because the sixty paintings have been divided between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington for decades, any exhibition that presents them all in sequence is self-recommending. (MoMA’s website also reproduces all sixty panels, with extensive commentary.) But the new show boasts an additional feature that should particularly appeal to Library of America readers—a well-organized side room devoted to literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Aficionados of book design will especially appreciate the display case featuring original hardcover editions, including seven titles reprinted in The Library of America series: Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright; Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson; Cane by Jean Toomer; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; and Quicksand by Nella Larsen.

The latter three works are included in the two-volume Library of America collection Harlem Renaissance Novels, which incorporates in its jacket and slipcase design several striking illustrations by Aaron Douglas, a major influence on Lawrence as a young artist. The MoMA exhibit showcases two of those illustrations in their original context—on the dust jackets for Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (third edition, Knopf, 1927) and McKay’s Home to Harlem (Harper & Brothers, 1928).

Above: Three books with jackets designed by Aaron Douglas. Elements from
the illustration for Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Home to Harlem
were incorporated in the jacket and slipcase design (below)
for the LOA boxed set Harlem Renaissance Novels.

Taken together, the books on display at MoMA form a literary analogue to the epic story Lawrence chronicled in his Migration Series. A quotation from Wright’s Black Boy (1945) in the accompanying wall text underscores the finality of that “one way” in the exhibition title. Describing his departure from Mississippi on a Chicago-bound train, Wright recalls:

I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. . . . My mood was: I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here.

MoMA’s exhibition website offers additional information about Douglas, “the leading Harlem Renaissance artist” who also collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on the groundbreaking 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets.

One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through September 7, 2015. Visit moma.org for complete exhibition information.