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Work in Progress - 25 November 2018

These blog pages are easier to produce than the web pages, so WIP and what I'm reading will appear here in future. Another concession to digital automatonisation. 

There was an interesting anecdote in Peter Ansonge's radio drama Portrait of a Gentleman, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 recently and still available to listen to. The play explores the possible relationship (or lack thereof) between Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson during their time in Venice. James is finishing The Portrait of a Lady and Fenimore is examining her life - both literary and romantic.

During the course of the play, James relates visits to writers in Paris and cites advice from Flaubert:

"The business of a writer is to finish a book; get to the end. Forget whether it's any good or not, or that you might be disappointed. You'll always be disappointed. Just finish it! That way, you get to write a second book."

A cursory search has not turned up a source for this advice, but it's truth is clear. Too many writers have built celebrity careers on not being able to write; whinging about writer's block on talk shows and at  "literary conferences" for the mindless, with the result that not being able to write has become a marketable commodity and acceptable culmination of a "literary life."

One of the results of listening to the play has been that I've downloaded The Portrait of a Lady, which I confess to never having read, and Fenimore Woolson's For the Major

I chose For the Major, a novella, because it deals with the post-Civil War South. As there are almost no novels about the American Civil War by people who lived through it, it had immediate appeal. I will let you know whether it is rightfully forgotten.

Trawling through articles on Fenimore Woolson reveals another characteristic of our age: the need to find "neglected", "forgotten" or "suppressed" writers from minority groups.

Talking about such things is fraught with danger. I object to the concept of minority fiction. All writing will appeal or not to sections of the potential audience. Talking about "minority fiction" is to construct a ghetto where none existed. Good books find readers, but books, like most things, "have a time." When that time is gone, the book (or other work) exists as an historical artefact and little more. 

Calling something that by today's standards is buttocks-clenchingly dreadful "a long neglected masterpiece" won't make it one. At best, it's fodder for another American PhD thesis, also doomed never to be read.

So, it is not with high expectations that I will read For the Major. Had Fenimore Woolson been a rival to Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot or Edith Wharton, I would have heard of her before.

Other books on the reading pile:

Susan Hill's The Pure in Heart, and Michele Giuttari's A Death in Calabria

On the writing front, I have finished my final read-through of Undivulged Crimes, a collection of short stories, and am doing the final read-through of Entrusted in Confidence, three stories with characters from The Countess Comes Home.

Finally, I'm feeling smug: I have written all my Christmas cards for the US and will send them this week. Next, Europe, then the UK.


Comments

  1. Must get my act together: I need to send a couple of cards to the US. I must confess that I can't get to grips with Henry James. I've started A Portrait of Lady three times with good intentions and yet, despite my good intentions, the rewards for persevering and navigating through the syntax seem meagre and disproportionate. Mind you, I adore The Turn of the Screw. Flaubert is my god and I think the advice you quote is spot on. I wouldn't go as far as to claim that he sometimes spent half a day finding the perfect word! My favourite quotation? 'I try to live in an ivory tower but ides f shit keep beating against the walls.'

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