the Lermontov medal

"It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: 'God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.' The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

draft in progress: over a hundred favorite novels (and novellas) not in order

      A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley

      The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Brothers Karamazov by F.D.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Chump Change by Dan Fante

The Sell-Out by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Light in August by William Faulkner

Hunger by Knut Hamsun 

Candide by Voltaire

Lolita by Nabokov

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Petersburg by Andrei Biely

Envy by Yuri Olesha

Native Son by Richard Wright

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2666 by Robert Bolano

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

The Music of Chance by Paul Auster

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Americana by Don DeLillo

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Libra by Don DeLillo

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

Water Music by T. C. Boyle

World's End by T.C. Boyle

Budding Prospects by T.C. Boyle

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attaction by Tom Robbins

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Nun by Denis Diderot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Zone by Mathias Enard

Journey to the End of Night by Celine

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

Camera by Jean-Phlippe Toussaint

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

Immortality by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Independence Day by Richard Ford

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Afterlives by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Shame by Salman Rushdie 

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

Firmin by Sam Savage

Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen and the Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt 

V by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

Crime and Punishment by F. D.

The Possessed (Demons or The Devils) by F. D.

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Washington Square by Henry James

Sula by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God

A Separate Peace

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rølvaag

Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon

White Mythology by W.D. Clarke

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

The Story of My Wife by Milan Fust

The Incorporation of Eric Chung by Steven C. Lo

Straight Man by Richard Russo

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera

Auggie's Revenge by Alex Kudera

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

A Passage to India by E. M. Forrester

All Quiet on the Western Front by E. Remarque

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Roughing It by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Joan Didion and the new nonfiction

"He didn't know what to make of that, and he began to invoke the names of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow and William Styron, whom we surely regarded as literary giants. We said those writers didn't happen to be our models, and we mentioned people like Lewis Thomas and Joan Didion and Gary Wills. He had never heard of them. One of the women mentioned Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and he hadn't heard of that. We explained that these were writers we admired for their ability to harness the issues and concerns of the day."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."

~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry

West of Sunset

"The war dwarfed their problems. What was a broken molar when the Germans were pushing through the Ardennes? [F. Scott Fitzgerald] went to the dentist and Belgium fell. Luxembourg, the Netherlands. He thought of Gerald and Sara's villa, and Sheilah's brother in London. Ernest [Hemingway] was probably there somewhere, filing hot copy.

"They were on their way to the World's Fair in San Francisco when the radio broadcast the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was a victory, saving the British army to fight again, but there was nothing to stop the Germans from taking Paris. [Fitzgerald] was there every day, on the Quai du Louvre with Scottie, as Cary Grant in the Ritz bar. Selfishly, he felt it was his city, his past they were taking from him--the gray, rainy streets and scabby sycamores and hennaed doyennes walking their little dogs in the Jardin des Plantes. He wondered if he would feel the same if the Japanese bombed Los Angeles."

~~ from West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan

Hemingway on Algren

"OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I'll never fight you in Chicago. Ever."

According to Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real, Ernest Hemingway wrote the praise above inside his personal copy of The Man With the Golden Arm.

Le Jardin du Luxembourg

“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway  

James Joyce in France

"We were hungry again from walking and Michaud's was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where [James] Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through is thick glasses [while] holding the menu in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio, thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia, with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian."

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway 

Papa On Pleasing the Rich

"When  they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has,' I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the every day a fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them."


~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway

On Writing in the First Person

“When you first start writing stories in the first person if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway

no matter what Scott did

“When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

In Paris, then. . .

"In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries."

~~ from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

The French stole the Grinch for Christmas!

I was all wound up for the wall, intoxicated by French theft of The Grinch gig employment, but then I snoozed and loosed. . . missed the entire airing. . . but who do we blame for this French foreign film tax credit noted near the end of the film credits? Chirac? Hollande? Macron? Le Socialisme? Sylvia Beach? Gertrude Stein? Hemingway? Disney? Des pommes frites? Houellebecq?

then suddenly

"How did you go bankrupt?"

 "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

~~ from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Let them think you were born that way

"It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way."

~~ Ernest Hemingway, as quoted in A Perfect Failure: Fante Bukowski III

Obituary

Philip Roth died famous, rich, and successful by common definition. He wrote an amazingly long list of books which are at least good, and they are always readable. By editing Penguin's Writers from the Other Europe series, he provided a major service to readers in English, and literature more generally, by widening access to Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, Tadeusz Borowski, and others from Eastern Europe. Pretty sure the last Philip Roth novel I've read is I Married a Communist, recommended, and the last one I began but didn't finish was The Counterlife. I haven't read any of them the year they were published, and I liked The Human Stain more than American Pastoral. The one with an imagined Anne Frank in it is great, but the title escapes me. I never finished The Great American Novel, but I had a copy as a teenager, purchased from Encore Books in their dollar remainder section, and I remember references to Hemingway as "Hem" in the opening. I believe that Portnoy's Complaint was the first Roth novel I've read, and the memoir Patrimony has always been one of my favorites. For one or two singular books, he's not as great as Pynchon, Barth, Bellow, DeLillo, and, no doubt, a few of his other relative contemporaries, but as of this writing, it seems like his books will last much longer on the shelf of bookstores than these other big names. His novels with historical or cultural themes almost always have a clever angle. I remember reading that Roth said he left academia because professors "weren't serious," and that he stopped dating because it was too time-consuming: "woman need to be entertained." A funny anecdote that I know of is that he requested a biography of Amiri Baraka from its African-American author, and the writer sent it signed, "Take it easy on the brothers." Roth thought that was hilarious, but it also relates to why I don't like American Pastoral. Last, sure anyone can detest being labeled as a "black writer" or "Jewish writer," but it's best to prove it by your pages. Roth could have shown much more often in his writing, and much more clearly, that he understood what it's like to be an American who isn't Jewish after World War II, the time period almost all of his books take place in. He's dead now, and I can't tell you with certainty what happens to him or anyone else at this stage of existence. Which sometimes is considered not existing. I'd be shocked if I made it to 85. Rest in peace.

Lillian Ross

Lillian Ross passed away, and I learned this from social media due to numerous shares of this excellent piece on Ernest Hemingway which I happened to chance upon and read in full a summer or two ago.

Sontag and Hem on solitude and the writing life

Thanks to an Annie Rose Facebook share, I read Ernest Hemingway's thoughts on solitude and the writing life from his 1954 Nobel Prize speech. The entry begins with Susan Sontag:

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag observed. Solitude, in fact, seems central to many great writers’ daily routines — so much so, it appears, that part of the writer’s curse might be the ineffable struggle to submit to the spell of solitude and escape the grip of loneliness at the same time.

Follow the link for more.

On Brexit lit

My contribution to the Daniel Dragomirescu's Contemporary Literary Horizon compilation of statements on the Brexit vote:

In many different ways and in different periods of history, the writer stands beyond the needs of any individual state or nation. We, as contributors to literature everywhere, know that a single day's vote, a "Brexit," cannot capture all of the nuances of all of the literatures to come out of, pass through, or in otherwise relate to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or elsewhere. Indeed, literature will remain a transient, and we will celebrate it for that reason, whether we are thinking of James Joyce's discovery of Italo Svevo's novels in Trieste or all the famous migrations before or after--Kundera in France, Hemingway in Cuba, Bolano in Spain, or some of today's great European writers--Aleksander Hemon, Joseph O'Neill, to name a couple--who make part or all of their lives in the United States. The state may demand of us everything--our time, allegiance, taxes, prayers, and more--but, as writers, we always live beyond such temporal concerns, recognizing the humanity we share. Best to England, best to Europe, and, of course, best to Daniel Peaceman, living beyond the borders as always.

Alex Kudera, American novelist of Fight for Your Long Day and Auggie's Revenge

 

 

(Although I did not return to Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant to prepare this statement, I read Ha Jin's  extended essay in 2009 and would consider it an influence among many other books on my thinking about Brexit and how it relates to literature and the lives of literary writers.)

the same obligation to be factual

A New Yorker article on Ernest Hemingway, which included a note about Papa's attack on Alfred Kazin after a bad review of Across the River and into the Trees, reminded me of a long quotation about Kazin from a book I'd recently come across.

"His memoirs tend to be even more memorable than his criticism, partly because when writing about himself he never felt the same obligation to be factual that he felt toward the writers he revered.
He constantly reshapes facts about his family and his marriages: the same wife gets different names in different books, marriages are conflated, he seems lonely, only child because his sister Pearl--she married the sociologist Daniel Bell--never gets mentioned."

~~from the Alfred Kazin section of Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers.

So perhaps Kazin could be perceived as a "Critic Laureate" at the Less United States of Kudera, as he continues to get mention at this blog. I wonder what the author of On Native Grounds would write about the current literary scene, both in and outside the academy.