Category Archives: Literature

Essay on the Editing of ‘The Great Gatsby’

by Editor

gatsbycover1The excellent literary blog called The Elegant Variations has a 4-part post that reprints an essay by Susan Bell about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to The Great Gatsby through his close work with editor Max Perkins.  Bell discusses the absolutely crystal sharp writing in Gatsby that was the result of meticulous rewrites from Fitzgerald and a strong editorial viewpoint from Perkins that the author was more than willing to acknowledge after publication.

Critical reaction at the time of the novel’s publication noted its incredibly polished writing:

For H. L. Mencken, the novel had “a careful and brilliant finish. . . . There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. . . . The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.

Here’s another quote from Bell’s essay:

In autumn 1924, Fitzgerald sent Perkins the Gatsby manuscript. The editor diagnosed its kinks, then wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism. “And as for the sheer writing, it is astonishing,” wrote Perkins. “The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry are most extraordinary.” A crucial problem, though, was the hero’s palpability. Perkins explained:

Among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

George Orwell’s Quest for Truthful Language

by Editor

New Statesman has a very interesting article by Keith Gessen about George Orwell’s ‘plain spoken’ style that manifested itself in a series of essays in the 1940s and found its full expression in his masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s fascinating to read about how Orwell’s experiences with fighting in Spain during the civil war in the 1930s and journalistic coverage of the events of that war influenced his use of altered and entirely untrustworthy newspaper articles in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Orwell apparently believed in clear, sharp and truthful language.  He did not want ready phrases or dead metaphors.  He wanted keen observation and simple expression.

I think he achieved this in Nineteen Eighty-Four to a great degree.  Mr. Gessen says one thing in his article that I don’t necessarily agree with: “In truth, Orwell was wrong about all sorts of things, not least the inner logic of totalitarianism: he thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin’s death.”

I don’t think that’s quite right.  The totalitarian regime in Nineteen Eighty-Four is overthrown.  In the last section of the book the writing jumps out into the future and discusses a quite obviously defunct and long-gone totalitarian state that tried to reduce language to its own ends.  I think the point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that complete control of a population can be largely achieved with various mind-control techniques and the constant application of fear, but that it requires only a modest intelligence to resist and eventually overthrow such control.  The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is just an ordinary schlump.  He’s not very bright.  Pretty dim in fact.  The idea with Winston Smith is if he can do it then anyone can.  And yet he is capable of resisting until his will is ultimately beaten out of him.  But the point is that the will to resist is a real pest.  You can’t remove it from society.  It always comes up and eventually overpowers all control structures.

Purchase Nineteen Eighty-Four

Fiction, Computer Games and Dante’s Inferno

by Editor

Here’s an article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph about how computer games are having a growing influence on literature.  As the game’s trailer shows, the upcoming computer game, Dante’s Inferno, will be a wild ride into hell.  I’m sure the game is full of levels as most games are and as Dante’s original literary Inferno certainly is.  It will also most likely contain a good sampling of quotations from the original since you’ve got two poets running around in hell making observations and explaining things for all of us.  In the electronic version I’m sure that Dante will get to cut off many limbs and heads and such things.  I don’t know – is gaming influencing literature or the other way around?  Maybe a little.  I think gaming is having more of an effect on film making.  Maybe the answer is in the trailer.  I also think that if you are going to make a game based on Inferno, you should not make it an action game.  You should make it an open-ended exploration of hell.  Just that.  No more required.

The Idea of a Muse Might be Sexist

by Editor | 2 Comments

Lee Siegel has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Where Have All the Muses Gone? Huh.  Well, let’s see if we can make a half-hearted stab at figuring that out.  Where have they all gone?  The first important thing to realize is that muses are female.  Apparently.  I’ve read through Mr. Siegel’s article and find it loaded with male artists who seem to require the subtle services of female muses.  Some of these men are even married to wives who are actual female artists but who function for Mr. Siegel and his article as ‘muses’ for their lucky men.

So it would seem that if you want to find out where all the muses have gone you would simply need to figure out where a woman would go who might be fed up with dragging her artist boyfriend or husband through the jagged ravine of his writer’s block.  I don’t know for sure but my guess is you might find her down at the municipal court house filing divorce papers.

Honestly, reading through Mr. Siegel’s article just makes me laugh.  Why doesn’t he have a single example of a female artist with a muse of her own?  It staggers the imagination to think that the world has not known a single woman artist with a male muse.  And Dante didn’t have a muse for goodness sake.  Beatrice?  Really?  Dante was a nasty little Italian man with a bone to pick with every passerby he ever ran into.  Reading Inferno is like reading through a litany of every petty wrong Dante felt he had to hold onto and seek literary revenge for.  This guy would have driven any kind of self-respecting muse straight into the nuthouse.  If I were Virgil I would have ditched him around the corner on the third level down.

You know who my muse is?  It’s Mick Jagger.

The illustration is Carl Wilhelm Friederich Oesterly’s portrait of Dante and his supposed muse Beatrice Portinari.

Shimmer Magazine Offers Latest Issue of Fantasy Stories as Free Download

by Editor

Shimmer is a magazine of contemporary speculative fiction.  Kind of a fantasy/sci-fi sort of thing.  They are offering their latest issue with 12 stories in it as a free download.  Some of the titles included are, The Carnivale of Abandoned Tales, Jaguar Woman, Counting Down to the End of the Universe, and an author interview.

Download the latest issue of Shimmer Magazine.

Online Novels Boom in China

by Editor

In China, there’s a revolution in online novels.  Writers are uploading their books to be read by millions of Chinese readers who pay a small amount for each book.  The leading company offering online novels in China is Shanda Literature.  Their site, Qidian.com, is the most popular destination for novel readers.  Even regular bookstores are now offering print versions of online novels.  Apparently, the online universe is China is relatively free of censorship and authors find themselves with more freedom to criticize.

Here’s a CNN article about the online publishing boom in China.