Katherine Mansfield to Princess Bibesco, March 24, 1921:

Dear Princess Bibesco,

I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of those things which is not done in our world.

You are very young. Won’t you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.

Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.

Yours sincerely,

Katherine Mansfield

From Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser:

We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing, and to that extent one can absolutely recommend Salzburg, probably like all other so-called beautiful towns, as a place of study, of course only to someone with a strong character, a weak character will inevitably be destroyed in the briefest time.

Saul Bellow was an old-fashioned man of letters. Part of what that means is that he traded a lot of letters with other people and seemed to have literary aspirations for his letters. I read a review of his newly collected letters which said that since people don’t write letters anymore, this was probably the last rich collection of letters we’d be seeing from a literary man. I doubt this is true, considering the generation after him figures prominently in his letters. I doubt Philip Roth will allow the posthumous publication of his letters, but I bet his letters will rival Bellow’s letters, some of which are to Roth. I also know that writers even from my own generation are still trading letters with the likes of, say, Don DeLillo. And I’ve seen the treasure trove of Raymond Carver’s correspondence in the Charvat collection at the Ohio State University, where I had to sign a form saying I wouldn’t tell you what was in them, but, listen hot-shit literary biographers interested in Carver’s era: There is stuff in there that will make your hair stand on end. There was a fair bit of nastiness flying about our nation’s postal thoroughfares in Carver days.

But I digress. Bellow’s letters are worth your time. They’re occasionally cranky. He was a political bird, to be sure, and it served his writing career and the writing career of others he helped. This isn’t the best stuff. The best stuff comes in late-life letters to true pals about matters that aren’t literary. Even in his eighties, the guy had a tremendous psychological acuity, and he always had the knack for special language (he tells a correspondent that he is awaiting a letter “in which you would be a little more recognizable than the Oscar of ‘cons’ and cold-owl trips to see a girl who fucks.”)

We recently Bernhard-obsessed types (surely I’m not the only one) will be interested in this:

As for Thomas Bernhard, he is a very strange bird indeed. I read him with respect and even admiration but he doesn’t reach my warmer feelings. What he does reach is my own bottomless hatred of the Nazis, especially the Austrian ones. He would have you think that virtually all Austrians were and remain Nazis. I see no reason to disagree. When I read Karl’s lovely poem about Auden’s grave I wondered why Auden should have wished to pass his last years [at Kirchstetten] in the society of such creeps. I seem to recall that he even addressed affectionate lines to some of them.

So says Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter, and fiction writing teacher at Ball State University (and formerly in the M.F.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh.) The reason the story has become a dominant form is that the university workshop encourages the writing of stories, not the writing of novels. Her quite reasonable questions: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”

Here’s the whole essay, at The Millions.

In this 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum, Jane Smiley said:

I am taking a medievalist’s view. That’s what I studied in graduate school. And when you are a medievalist you don’t study what’s good, you study what’s left. And you try to find good things in it. So you come to appreciate every fragment of every bit that’s left. And try to glean something from that fragment, whatever it is.

How does it survive? There are a lot of copies of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown around. Not so many of Cynthia Ozick and Barry Hannah, relatively speaking. And way fewer of, say, Christine Schutt and Ben Marcus. Are they in physical danger?

There is also the priestly tradition — what gets revived, by whom, and how does it impact future readership or future revivals? (Justin Taylor did Donald Barthelme a huge favor on these grounds, READ MORE >

I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. Even when I’m driving, I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. I once drove eight hours, from Pensacola to Lake Wales, Florida, while reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This horrified everyone who cared about me. This was before the days of education about texting and driving. I was doing a two-year stint as a traveling salesman of a sort (I peddled eighth-rate university educations), which was great for seeing the country. Most of the country I saw was country I saw after I arrived at a place. The bulk of my out-of-Florida driving was on interstate highways, and they all look the same. My in-Florida driving was on two-lane roads I came to know the way you know the neighborhood roads that lead to your house. It got boring, I mean, and I was in the best phase of a reader’s life — that time when you have discovered that there is a vast literature available for you to read, but you haven’t yet read most of it.

Something happened, though. I traded my father a car for a pickup truck. The pickup truck had a manual transmission. I wasn’t very good with the stick shift. The first time I took it out on Highway 27, I stalled it at in intersection. The light turned green, and I tried to go, but I blew it. A man in a tiny white car rammed into my back bumper. It wasn’t a high-impact accident, but his wife was nine months pregnant. She was okay, but I had nightmares for a week about killing other people’s babies. There are other kinds of accidents, my wife said. What if you had been going fifty miles per hour? What if you had been reading? READ MORE >

Instead of doing a gotcha search on Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” I recommend that its critics read it. They will find that Twain’s Jim has more depth than the parade of black male characters that one finds in recent movies, theater and literature, who are little more than lethal props. Jim is self sufficient, capable of fending for himself amidst dire circumstances, cares about his family, is religious and has goals. He is one of the few characters in the book with any kind of integrity.

In a time when blacks were considered by some to be little more than brutes, Twain has blacks communicating with one another through complicated codes while the whites commit such violence against the slaves and each other that the feuding between two families is such that only a few male members remain. Twain uses the same aggressive satire to expose the hypocrisy of the slave owners.

The fact that a critic has taken to tampering with Twain’s great work is another sign that the atavistic philistinism that has taken hold of our politics and culture has found a place in academia.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal (which has suddenly become a friend of literature in the last two years. Who would have thought the Wall Street Journal would be running pieces by Ishmael Reed? It’s a thing worth celebrating.)

The fact that I don’t have as many readers in Yiddish as I would have liked to have bothers me. It’s not good that a language is going downhill instead of up. I would like Yiddish to bloom and flower just as the Yiddishists say it does bloom and flower. But as far as translation is concerned, naturally every writer loses in translation, particularly poets and humorists. Also writers whose writing is tightly connected to folklore are heavy losers. In my own case, I think I am a heavy loser. But then lately I have assisted in the translating of my works, and knowing the problem, I take care that I don’t lose too much. The problem is that it’s very hard to find a perfect equivalent for an idiom in another language. But then it’s also a fact that we all learned our literature through translation. Most people have studied the Bible only in translation, have read Homer in translation, and all the classics. Translation, although it does do damage to an author, it cannot kill him: if he’s really good, he will come out even in translation. And I have seen it in my own case. Also, translation helps me in a way. Because I go through my writings again and again while I edit the translation and work with the translator, and while I am doing this I see all the defects of my writing. Translation has helped me avoid pitfalls which I might not have avoided if I had written the work in Yiddish and published it and not been forced because of the translation to read it again.

Read the rest at the Paris Review.

The suicides and untimely deaths of friends and family have been piling up the last ten years. I had a close friend when I lived in Florida who was a city utilities worker. He was into kung fu movies and karate and beach volleyball and very unlucky with women. He met a woman after he was diagnosed with leukemia, and they married, but it must have been hard to be married to a terminally ill person, and she left him in the end, but before the end. It seemed unexcusable to me that she left him before the end, but then she was the one who was changing the bedsheets and holding his head over the toilet and watching him turn skeletal and lose teeth. READ MORE >

MINOR: Extraordinary Renditions does a thing that some say fiction ought not do — it assumes the points of view of characters from different cultures than the writer’s. Writers used to do this all the time, but it seemed to get controversial around the time of the civil rights movement — the furor in some quarters over Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, to give one example, and the subsequent defense by James Baldwin on the grounds that Styron was doing a thing fiction writers have an obligation to do, by putting himself “in the skin of Nat Turner.”

ERVIN: It was never a question to me if I had the right to write from different cultural perspectives. As a writer of immense privilege, I felt it was my responsibility to do so. Not that I was trying to make some sort of grand, dogmatic political statement; there were simply some stories that for various reasons I felt needed telling. Yes, the second of these three novellas, “Brooking the Devil,” uses many of the tropes of the captivity narrative. The relatively new genre of the neo-slave narrative—begun in large part by Styron—is the single most important tradition in contemporary American letters. Where would we be without Beloved and The Wind Done Gone and Flight to Canada? For a white writer like myself to ignore race, and our nation’s racist history (and present) would be unconscionable. READ MORE >