Charles Jackson to Philip Rahv

"'The story kills me to write it,' [Charles Jackson] confessed to Philip Rahv: 'I've never done anything that takes so much out of me; and during the past month it's gotten me down so that I've become neurotic as hell, nervous, depressed, and even at times have thought the only solution is suicide.'"

~~ from Blake Bailey's Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson 

Winter, 1965 by Frederic Tuten

I enjoyed "Winter, 1965" by Frederic Tuten, which I chanced upon collected in the O'Henry Prize Stories 2016 and read in the library on a rainy morning this past week. Although it's a cliche for writers to write about the sad doubting lives of literary writers, it's also a cliche to criticize these same stories about writers. In any event, in the right mood, I'm a sucker for such tales, particularly if they have mention of critics past such as Philip Rahv while unpublished, alienated writers read Celine, fret, and ponder their future. 

It made sense that "Winter, 1965" would find me because in the few days before landing on it, I'd been mulling over the opening paragraph of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan: 

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

But for now, not yet old, I move along to other literary things.