I find it interesting that Wallace Stevens life was so uninteresting. He went to law school and got a job at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company…and that was pretty much it, except he wrote some beautiful poetry in his spare time.
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I find it interesting that Wallace Stevens life was so uninteresting. He went to law school and got a job at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company…and that was pretty much it, except he wrote some beautiful poetry in his spare time.
Would have to be Dashiell Hammett as I am very fond of his Continental Op stories. Have often wondered what he would have written if writer's block and a disdain for the detective genre had not killed his career off circa 1935. Almost 30 years went by and he started a few things but never finished them. Helped Lillian Hellman with her plays but I was never a fan of her. To give her due credit she followed his wishes and allowed only certain stories/books to stay in print but since her death his othe rmaterial is seeing the light of day which has been a mixed blessing as I see some stories are best left in the dust bin. Sigh. But at least all the Op stories made it back.
Not utterly devoid of colorful moments as he, Wallace Stevens, had decked Ernest Hemingway while they were in a bar.Quote:
Originally Posted by Trekker114
Another very good book about Marlowe is The Reckoning by Charles Nicholl, about the strange circumstances of his death. He's one of the authors who intrigue me, along with the greatest writer of them all of course, Shakespeare. Other greats who I find fascinating are Zola, Orwell, Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and many more. I am usually interested in a person if I like their work.Quote:
Originally Posted by bree
I haven't read much Hugo biography, but I think Les Miserables is the weaker masterpiece, due to his daughter's death. Hunchback has some of Hugo's long-windedness, but IMO, is better paced.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vincent Black
Les Miserables was nearly laying it on too thick, and I think it exhausted my capacity to ever reread it.
I know they didn't have grief counselors in those days, but Hugo verily needed one.
Les Miserables surely rambles on, has vast digressions, can be overly melodramatic, and plays it loose and quick with historical facts... especially if these facts concern a culture outside of that of France (Chauvinism being another great flaw as can be seen when he writes of Cromwell or the American Revolution which are significant only for their parallels with Napoleon and the French Revolution). In spite of its flaws, Les Miserables is still a masterpiece... albeit a flawed one... but then again, the same might easily be said of Don Quixote. The fact is that Hugo's output is so great and he had an ego to match, so that one is led to imagine the "great man" unwilling to attempt to edit his own work. Or perhaps his drive and energy were such that he could not bother with such... having finished one work he was on to the next. Hugo surely is a writer that could have and does benefit from a good editor... although personally I want nothing to do with an edited, cropped down version of Les Miserables. Give me all of it... the good, the bad, and the ugly... and I'll make up my own mind.
I doubt that the death of Hugo's daughter played a major part in the resulting inconsistencies or flaws of Les Miserables. Hugo's daughter died from drowning at the age of 19 in 1843. For two years Hugo was unable to write any poetry. In 1851 he was exiled from France under Napoleon III and this reopened the wound as a result of his being unable to even visit his daughter's grave (a yearly ritual). In 1856 he composed A celle qui est restee en France (To the One Who Stayed in France), as part of his seminal poetic collection, Contemplations. This was one of his strongest poems, and along with At Villequier it has been put forward as holding a position within Hugo's oeuvre similar to that held by "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" in the oeuvre of Whitman. Les Miserables was published in 1862, and while one surely never forgets the death of one's child, I doubt that he was still so traumatized nearly twenty years after the fact, as that it led to his artistic failings... especially when one considers the wealth of writings... poetic and otherwise... from this period.
Cognizant argument, but I am not entirely convinced there were some unresolved bereavements of Hugo's that made Valjean's surrender of Cosette slightly unwholesome.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I surfed some of the end chapters looking for the passage where Hugo writes that Valjean had emotionally put all his eggs in one basket, sexually, paternally, and otherwise, in his need to be near Cosette, and could not find it, but Les Miserables is too much novel not simply because 19th novelists had to expound on everything, but because Hugo was incapable of dispassionate observation.
Unlike, say, Henry James. James's repression of his sexual orientation now colors nearly every reading of his major works in the tireless revisionism of the academy, but I would still argue his inability to come out of the closet doesn't hinder the reader from a better empathy for Isabel Archer than for the ups and downs of Valjean's fortunes.
Editors always say Hugo's heart was in the right place in Les Miserables, but that doesn't really count for much with me. More head might have created a better work.
I am always wary of too great of a Freudian interpretation of any artist's work. Knowledge of an artist's repressed sexual orientation, childhood traumas, Oedipal complexes, familial conflicts, etc... are intriguing... but only go so far. Certainly the creation of any work of art includes elements of the subconscious or subliminal... references to hidden desires, repressed needs and beliefs... but there is also much that is quite conscious... quite aware. There is also the element of role-playing...or as Wilde suggests, "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."
I guess it would change my perception of Henry James if I knew whether he was monastic or secretly slept with men. I have a copy of Sheldon Novack's biography which I haven't started yet, in all these years since he sent it to me as a gift.
I prefer to see James as celibate--which says more about me than Henry James.
Interpreting the masterworks through a closeted code--much like one is taught to do with EM Forster, this may be titillating, and offer new perspectives, but for me it breaks my heart. I have argued on the James listserv that James had too fine a mind to have his work filed in the gay and lesbian section of the book store.
My objection was cast as "an oversimplification" which rankled.
However, I only recently read "The Master..." a later short story, and the homoeroticism reaches out and slaps you in the face, so, I suppose James was feeling his oats as 1916 moved in.
It is sad, and I know asserting it is sad isn't all that objective :)
Dostoevsky, for sure.
You can't beat Hemingway- he had the life I most want to copy out of all my favourite authors.
Sylvia Plath~
Oh, I agree on this one (It's Sylvia, though).Quote:
Originally Posted by Bakiryu
Oh sorry, I just typed it really fast and totally spaced out (ADHD anyone? :lol: )Quote:
Originally Posted by coolestnerdever