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Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers since the Sixties
Jerome Klinkowitz is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. He has written more than thirty books on literature, music, philosophy, art, sports, military historiography, and contemporary culture, including Literary Disruptions, Structuring the Void , and Short Season .
226 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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July 24, 2016
Portraits of Kurt Vonnegut (the author is KV’s principal scholar), Gilbert Sorrentino, Clarence Major, Donald Barthelme, and Jerzy Kosinski. Each portrait is a warm and candid recollection of these legendary writers, with Kosinski being a particularly fascinating monster, and Sorrentino’s early bitterness expanded upon with either startling inaccuracy or a wonkily remembered sincerity. More critics should write these sorts of entertaining intellectual and personal histories. [In the light of the N.R. review, it has become clear that this book is fairly inaccurate . . . however, Klink is nothing less than generous and candid (based on his experiences), so lighten up, folks].
goldfinch-in-juice
July 23, 2016Friend MJ in his review had this to conclude “...and Sorrentino’s early bitterness expanded upon with more honesty than usual.” John O’Brien of The Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press has something slightly different to say. In his FOUR page review of this Klinkowitz (and also of Namedropping from Richard Elman (about which O’Brien says about the same)) found in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1998): Richard Powers / Rikki Ducornet, p261ff. (typical RCF reviews are a page or less.) I’ll provide a few highlights in what follows. [abbrev’s and the like are all mine]
He begins :: “To set the record straight...” Once upon a time, at Northern Illinois University, Klinkowitz was “a young professor” and O’Brien was “an even younger graduate student.” K “did a few very nice things for me that I have never forgotten and for which I have kept silent over the years about his critical writings because I would not have had anything positive to say about them.” O’B, lets it be known, from approx. 1988-98, as DAP editor, had rejected two books by K ; one of which is the volume under discussion. O’B rejected it ;; let it however be known that the submitted sample chapters were not those of which O’B was subject of discussion.
“...slick, sloppy writing that seems to serve no other purpose than to promote himself, usually at the expense of the poor writers who are his subjects. To call his criticism superficial would be to compliment it.”
“...he seemed to get it in his head that criticism should consist of anecdotes and read like a story in People”.
“...his ever-expanding umbrella of what constitutes innovation, resulting in one of his more embarrassing critical inventions call ‘superrealism,’ a term that allowed him to claim that even the most realistic of writers are also (strike up the band!) innovative.”
“The problems (to use a gracious term) with this book range from A to Z (why, at times like these, do we have such few letters in our alphabet?”. Hey John → take a page from mathematics ; from Latin → Greek → Hebrew → Cyrillic. “It is self-indulgent, self-congratulatory (its basic thesis is that, without Professor Klinkowitz, none of the writers would have ‘made it,’ carrying them on his back but rarely given credit by them for what he had accomplished on their behalf), and self-serving.”
“...their desire for him to stay away...something amounting to having a used-car salesman promote their work.”
“...saying that what was said about me bordered on the libelous (as I said above, when the manuscript was sent to me to consider for publication, the chapter on Gilbert Sorrentino and Clarence Major, in which my name comes up a number of times, was not included).”
“In any event, it has taken several years for this manuscript to find a publisher, and finally a university press went for it and found outside readers who apparently were ill-informed enough to swallow its inaccuracies.”
“I was there the night Professor K met Gilbert Sorrentino, and in fact am the one responsible (God help me) for introducing them. Half of what the Professor records about the event is made up out of whole cloth. The scowling Sorrentino that the Professor portrays didn’t exist that night, though in retrospect I can imagine that such was imagined as the Professor made his usually stupid argument that if you could get kids hooked on Vonnegut, one day they would step up to the more serious writers. Later in the chapter the Professor imagines that a character in S’s Mulligan Stew is based upon him, as though S hadn’t met enough hick professors in his time to have to rely on this one as a model. And still later the Professor claims credit for getting S his Job at Stanford University, making him, by my count, the nineteenth person to make this claim. But to return to the evening when S and the Professor met. The line that the Professor uses to describe S’s appearance at the door is lifted word for word (without any attribution) from an essay I wrote about S years ago: need anything else be said for the level of scholarship in this book?”
Let’s look at the next para ::
“As to the P’s claim that he was able to escape the domineering influence of S while I was not (e.g., under S’s influence I became ‘stern’ and ‘abrupt’), all that I can say is that the P is being kind here. The fact is that I have always been an opinionated asshole who has no time for fools. The P credits S for these qualities in me. As to S’s influence on my sensibilities, that’s a matter of record. But as both Pound and Shklovsky argued many years ago, one chooses those influences, and indeed I did. And that influence, which I have talked about extensively in interviews over the years, was and is at work in both the RCF and DAP. This should be news to no one, and in fact some other Professor years ago wrote a long article complaining about the same thing, that S greatly influenced the Review and that the Review is not ‘objective [whatever this might mean] scholarship.’ Indeed, nor was it ever intended to be. It has always represented a cause that says this writing is good and that writing is bad. If there is problem [sic] with the Review along these lines, it is that the Review does not draw these distinctions often enough.”
“But more curious than what the P has to say about S is what he does with Clarence Major, a writer who has nothing whatsoever to do with S’s aesthetics but gets wrapped into the same chapter; the only thing that seems to unite them here is that they both grew rather unfond of the P… [...] ...choosing to have the likes of Toni Morrison blurb his books rather than us...who in the hell would want my blurb when he could get Toni Morrison’s?”
“...This is a rather basic error to make about a writer’s work, especially when the point of the paragraph suggests that this fiction represents a decline in S’s work. But who’s to notice, who’s to care? It sounds fine, sounds right, just as long as the reader doesn’t know anything, or apparently the editor of this book.”
“...several years later he hooked up with Sukenick in Paris. Leaving aside the content of this meeting, I want to point out that the P says that they ‘walked across part of town to Ron’s neighborhood’ and that, along the way, they ‘paused’ ‘for some fresh country wine.’ Well, let’s see here. Paris is not a city that is referred to as ‘town’; Cedar Falls and Milwaukee are such cities. And, though I do not drink very much wine and know next to nothing about it, I can’t imagine what ‘fresh country wine’ might be: grape juice? Perhaps it is such things as these that caused, according to the P’s lights, G.S. to think of the P as a hick.”
“.. have been forthright enough to entitle it thus: ‘How I Made Careers for So Many Writers and How I Imagine They Have Scorned Me’…”
“Which editor at State University of New York accepted the above title? I don’t know, but it might be the same one who accepted Richard Elman’s appropriately titled Namedropping.... [...] ….and (what are the chances?) one of the chapters is about Gilbert Sorrentino.”
“I want to point out a very peculiar omission: nowhere does the book mention----[all the usual places such a fact might be mentions]---that Richard Elman died about a year ago.”
“At any rate, we have a three-page assessment of the personality and writing career of G.S., and once again we get the picture of the wounded, ‘difficult,’ reclusive personality (‘the Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower’). Let’s check the chapter for accuracy….. [...].....I knew G.S. very well in those years and frequently heard stories about and critical assessments of Jones; they were all warm personal anecdotes or very positive views of his work….[...].....Elman says how uncomfortable he felt around S: ‘It was hard to relax in his company. He always seemed to be scrutinizing you for errors or illiteracies…..’ If S was refusing to comment on Jones, my guess is that the conversation had already hit the point where S knew to whom he was talking, and perhaps had stumbled across enough ‘illiteracies’ for the day.”
“Elman says that Sorrentino ‘had a hard time bringing out his novels with trade publishers.’ since Elman does not provide any dates for anything, one has to guess as to what period this statement might apply…[conjectures made]....Are these or are they not trade houses?....[...]....Either Elman didn’t know who had pub’d S’s work, or more likely, he did, and yet these facts would not fit his argument about the embittered novelist who couldn’t get pub’d by a serious trade house….[...]....so that someone who really doesn’t know the facts, will take the assessment as a fair, perhaps even more than fair.”
“The misfortune of both of these books, but especially the first, is that they are so badly done and represent fragile egos at work. While many of the writers that K covers still remain unrecognized in contemporary American lit, and since yet another university is willing to give him space in its catalog, the book could have been an opportunity to provide much-needed discussion; instead, it becomes an occasion for the author’s self-imposed illusion that he made them well known.”
“One final note: Gilbert Sorrentino is the most important American novelist since the late 1960s. This fact is always worth keeping in mind.”
[not proof’d on my part. sorries]
He begins :: “To set the record straight...” Once upon a time, at Northern Illinois University, Klinkowitz was “a young professor” and O’Brien was “an even younger graduate student.” K “did a few very nice things for me that I have never forgotten and for which I have kept silent over the years about his critical writings because I would not have had anything positive to say about them.” O’B, lets it be known, from approx. 1988-98, as DAP editor, had rejected two books by K ; one of which is the volume under discussion. O’B rejected it ;; let it however be known that the submitted sample chapters were not those of which O’B was subject of discussion.
“...slick, sloppy writing that seems to serve no other purpose than to promote himself, usually at the expense of the poor writers who are his subjects. To call his criticism superficial would be to compliment it.”
“...he seemed to get it in his head that criticism should consist of anecdotes and read like a story in People”.
“...his ever-expanding umbrella of what constitutes innovation, resulting in one of his more embarrassing critical inventions call ‘superrealism,’ a term that allowed him to claim that even the most realistic of writers are also (strike up the band!) innovative.”
“The problems (to use a gracious term) with this book range from A to Z (why, at times like these, do we have such few letters in our alphabet?”. Hey John → take a page from mathematics ; from Latin → Greek → Hebrew → Cyrillic. “It is self-indulgent, self-congratulatory (its basic thesis is that, without Professor Klinkowitz, none of the writers would have ‘made it,’ carrying them on his back but rarely given credit by them for what he had accomplished on their behalf), and self-serving.”
“...their desire for him to stay away...something amounting to having a used-car salesman promote their work.”
“...saying that what was said about me bordered on the libelous (as I said above, when the manuscript was sent to me to consider for publication, the chapter on Gilbert Sorrentino and Clarence Major, in which my name comes up a number of times, was not included).”
“In any event, it has taken several years for this manuscript to find a publisher, and finally a university press went for it and found outside readers who apparently were ill-informed enough to swallow its inaccuracies.”
“I was there the night Professor K met Gilbert Sorrentino, and in fact am the one responsible (God help me) for introducing them. Half of what the Professor records about the event is made up out of whole cloth. The scowling Sorrentino that the Professor portrays didn’t exist that night, though in retrospect I can imagine that such was imagined as the Professor made his usually stupid argument that if you could get kids hooked on Vonnegut, one day they would step up to the more serious writers. Later in the chapter the Professor imagines that a character in S’s Mulligan Stew is based upon him, as though S hadn’t met enough hick professors in his time to have to rely on this one as a model. And still later the Professor claims credit for getting S his Job at Stanford University, making him, by my count, the nineteenth person to make this claim. But to return to the evening when S and the Professor met. The line that the Professor uses to describe S’s appearance at the door is lifted word for word (without any attribution) from an essay I wrote about S years ago: need anything else be said for the level of scholarship in this book?”
Let’s look at the next para ::
“As to the P’s claim that he was able to escape the domineering influence of S while I was not (e.g., under S’s influence I became ‘stern’ and ‘abrupt’), all that I can say is that the P is being kind here. The fact is that I have always been an opinionated asshole who has no time for fools. The P credits S for these qualities in me. As to S’s influence on my sensibilities, that’s a matter of record. But as both Pound and Shklovsky argued many years ago, one chooses those influences, and indeed I did. And that influence, which I have talked about extensively in interviews over the years, was and is at work in both the RCF and DAP. This should be news to no one, and in fact some other Professor years ago wrote a long article complaining about the same thing, that S greatly influenced the Review and that the Review is not ‘objective [whatever this might mean] scholarship.’ Indeed, nor was it ever intended to be. It has always represented a cause that says this writing is good and that writing is bad. If there is problem [sic] with the Review along these lines, it is that the Review does not draw these distinctions often enough.”
“But more curious than what the P has to say about S is what he does with Clarence Major, a writer who has nothing whatsoever to do with S’s aesthetics but gets wrapped into the same chapter; the only thing that seems to unite them here is that they both grew rather unfond of the P… [...] ...choosing to have the likes of Toni Morrison blurb his books rather than us...who in the hell would want my blurb when he could get Toni Morrison’s?”
“...This is a rather basic error to make about a writer’s work, especially when the point of the paragraph suggests that this fiction represents a decline in S’s work. But who’s to notice, who’s to care? It sounds fine, sounds right, just as long as the reader doesn’t know anything, or apparently the editor of this book.”
“...several years later he hooked up with Sukenick in Paris. Leaving aside the content of this meeting, I want to point out that the P says that they ‘walked across part of town to Ron’s neighborhood’ and that, along the way, they ‘paused’ ‘for some fresh country wine.’ Well, let’s see here. Paris is not a city that is referred to as ‘town’; Cedar Falls and Milwaukee are such cities. And, though I do not drink very much wine and know next to nothing about it, I can’t imagine what ‘fresh country wine’ might be: grape juice? Perhaps it is such things as these that caused, according to the P’s lights, G.S. to think of the P as a hick.”
“.. have been forthright enough to entitle it thus: ‘How I Made Careers for So Many Writers and How I Imagine They Have Scorned Me’…”
“Which editor at State University of New York accepted the above title? I don’t know, but it might be the same one who accepted Richard Elman’s appropriately titled Namedropping.... [...] ….and (what are the chances?) one of the chapters is about Gilbert Sorrentino.”
“I want to point out a very peculiar omission: nowhere does the book mention----[all the usual places such a fact might be mentions]---that Richard Elman died about a year ago.”
“At any rate, we have a three-page assessment of the personality and writing career of G.S., and once again we get the picture of the wounded, ‘difficult,’ reclusive personality (‘the Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower’). Let’s check the chapter for accuracy….. [...].....I knew G.S. very well in those years and frequently heard stories about and critical assessments of Jones; they were all warm personal anecdotes or very positive views of his work….[...].....Elman says how uncomfortable he felt around S: ‘It was hard to relax in his company. He always seemed to be scrutinizing you for errors or illiteracies…..’ If S was refusing to comment on Jones, my guess is that the conversation had already hit the point where S knew to whom he was talking, and perhaps had stumbled across enough ‘illiteracies’ for the day.”
“Elman says that Sorrentino ‘had a hard time bringing out his novels with trade publishers.’ since Elman does not provide any dates for anything, one has to guess as to what period this statement might apply…[conjectures made]....Are these or are they not trade houses?....[...]....Either Elman didn’t know who had pub’d S’s work, or more likely, he did, and yet these facts would not fit his argument about the embittered novelist who couldn’t get pub’d by a serious trade house….[...]....so that someone who really doesn’t know the facts, will take the assessment as a fair, perhaps even more than fair.”
“The misfortune of both of these books, but especially the first, is that they are so badly done and represent fragile egos at work. While many of the writers that K covers still remain unrecognized in contemporary American lit, and since yet another university is willing to give him space in its catalog, the book could have been an opportunity to provide much-needed discussion; instead, it becomes an occasion for the author’s self-imposed illusion that he made them well known.”
“One final note: Gilbert Sorrentino is the most important American novelist since the late 1960s. This fact is always worth keeping in mind.”
[not proof’d on my part. sorries]
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews