Novelists No One Reads Anymore

i guess i think of wild boys as the spot where he jettisons the formal bs and the confessional junky stuff and really gets down to it, and then the cities of the red night is an expansion on that (pirates, cowboys and indians, sword and sandal being popular topics for early 20c runaway wild boy imaginations)

yeah, i would agree. of course the themes remain, but Wild Boys feels more apace with a fantasy novel about a war of feral twinks against polite society than the sad junky elicit desire exoticism of the early works.

he was, of course, an execrable person, but Wild Boys really is a treasure.

yeah for me i sort of got into the beats via burroughs. like i wanted to hang out with this weird poltergeist ii looking dude from ministry's "just one fix" and learn his weird negative philosophies. it wasn't like "now i want to read the one who hooked kerouac up with pills like a creepy older cousin with a fake ID, and survived hard drugs by turning into a scarecrow"

actually that makes it sound a lot cooler than it is, esp when you get into actual biography. i also appreciate that he moves away from the misogyny during that period, although i guess if you look at papers, interviews, etc he never quite hangs up it up entirely, even the worst stuff

yeah i found out enough to know i was fine with liking one of his books a lot, nothing more.

I think the Beat poets have had a bit better luck at finding readers than the novelists who aren't Kerouac.

Those are the only Beat-associated novelists beyond the Big Two that I can even think of (although later, when I read Tropic of Cancer, I thought the Beats might be influenced by Miller, who hasn't been mentioned yet on this thread, has he?)

i remember a burroughs interview where he specifically denies any miller influence, on him anyway.

ferlinghetti wrote at least one novel which i don't think i ever finished. lew welch wrote an unfinished novel which i liked. haven't read any of these peeps since my teens.

will always have a soft spot for miller for pointing me in the direction of so many other better writers.

Miller isn’t read much by young people because shocking sexism and graphic sex scenes aren’t too welcome.

Ginsberg’s aura has gone down a lot since his death and people became aware of two things: firstly, he was a NAMBLA supporter (yuk), and secondly, other than about ten poems, most of his work is abysmal

I picked up a copy of *The Colossus of Maroussi* recently. I think I'll leave Miller to memory but if I was to re-read him, this is where I'd go.

i don't find Miller especially graphic but his misogyny is very hard to get past. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was the last book of his i still felt affection for but that's probably 20+ years ago

i've read a couple of Clellon Holmes's books, Nelson Algren feels like a proto-Beat in that mould, i think these are not "nobody reads" authors but v limited interest nowadays?

I went through a Miller phase in my early 20s, largely because Hunter Thompson, whose writing I still idolize, said he was, and I think this quote is right, "a fucking brilliant writer." Yes, he could write great sentences, that much is true. But everything said upthread is otm. Also, I read a biography of him once, and came away with the impression that he spent most of his life asking other people for money.

He did point me in the direction of Lawrence Durrell, who is mentioned upthread and who, while is not much read any more, probably should be.

asking other people for money is the mark of an artist tbf

Yeah, but he seemed to spend most of his waking hours doing that rather than writing. And he was obnoxious enough about it that most of his friends recalled that first and foremost.

I did very much enjoy his turn in Reds.

i was semi-joking, the "artist as bum" trope is its own kind of mythology. for another thread i guess - earning a living but staying free enough to do your thing without compromise, and whether that's possible or desirable

there are a few glorious beautiful passages in tropic of cancer but yeah ick

Was Steve Katz ever read in the first place?

i’ve had these thoughts too but i think if anything maybe it’s maybe just being part this line of mean mister self destructs that maybe also includes celine and baudelaire etc

“how i fought the law and found redemption transcended morality by hurting the people around me” pfffffft not so fast buddy

I did very much enjoy his turn in Reds.

"there was just as much fucking going on back then as there is now"

That was what young I got from Tropic! Wasn't surprised by the sexism, broads there for the taking etc.---don't remember racism, but wouldn't have been surprised by some of that, given the generation (also just as much that going on then as now). But without remembering specifics, overall, and warts and all, I thought it was---impressively well-constructed and articulate and robust, for something made out of scroungey old man--but also I read that it took him ten years to put it together, and given his limitations even so, one book was enough for me (though I'll check out xpostColossus if come across it).
That happens sometimes anyway, like somehow The Moviegoer. though great, is enough Percy for me, though I know I'm missing out.

After The Moviegoer you only really need The Last Gentleman and maybe some of the essays in Signposts in a Strange Land and The Message in the Bottle

Feel like YMP and I weighed in on this pretty recently, maybe upthread.

Yeah probably upthread, but maybe not so recently; we've been doing this a while.

Less familiarly, perhaps:

Speaking of The Moviegoer and Percy though, I sometimes wonder about novelists who were Beat without being part of that movement or whatever you call it: A certain vein of early-to-mid-century American, maybe especially Catholic artistry, looking out at the world, passing through it, committed to some things but always speculative, mystical in personal ways: Percy (no Graham Greene, but also suited to being) the convert, Kerouac born into it, at least in working class work-drink-think cycles, ---and James Agee, who seems like he may have influenced Kerouac, or at least preceded him via his own such (middle class) cycles, def incl. expeditionary flights as novelist, and machine-gun typewritin' moviegoer, for that matter, seemingly brushed by his Southern (Gothic?) "Anglo-Catholic" high church Episcopal upbringing, and then deepened by the (actually Catholic?) college mentor and lifelong correspondent---
Also, not Catholic, but---in Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman says, "Even Faulkner is Beat, in a complicated way," and thinking of that, I always think first of thee purple prolix barnstorming ov Pylon---Gough Man Gough!
(WF reportedly wrote it to "let off steam" from a bigger project: quite the work-drink holiday, I say.)

^nice post!

Thanks---one other thing, re the artist as mooch: for all his faults, Ginsberg, judging by what I've read and been told over many years, was quietly generous, right up to the end.

Ginsberg came into some money by selling his papers to Stanford University. He did a reading on campus and played the harmonium and chanted a bit in the mid-90s.

I guess Patreon and crowdfunding have enabled some artists to keep going economically.

This piece on Lisa Carver is illuminating on the material aspects of being a writer on the edges of economic viability from the ‘90s to the present:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-43/reviews/live-free-or-die/

I've told this story in another thread, but I worked at a record store in Boulder, Colorado in the 80s. Boulder was also home to the Naropa Institute, at which Ginsberg was a regular visitor. He would come into the store from time to time and ask whether we had the album First Blues (he never identified it as his, but of course we all knew who he was). I told him we did. What I didn't tell him was that it was the same copy we'd always had.

Omnivore has brought out a greatly expanded and often great The Last Word on First Blues, The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience and one I haven't heard, At Reed College: The First Recorded Reading Of Howl & Other Poems The olde Holy Soul Jelly Roll box is awes, ditto his Hal Willner-produced The Lion For Real. Like Burroughs and Kerouac, he was often at his best as performer, with his singing, speaking and harmonium guiding Don Cherry Elvin Jones,Arthur Russell, Dylan, Ribot, Frisell, The Clash etc. etct

(Novel-wise,Valmouth is so far pretty stupid, trying to decide whether to jump to ilx-favored The Flower Beneath The Foot or send these Five Novels back to library loan.)

I learned from John Szwed's Harry Smith bio that Allen Ginsberg gave him tons of $ & support (& Ginsberg wasn't rich) & Smith's later work wouldn't have been possible without Ginsberg. Also this Ginsberg LP recorded by Smith at the Chelsea Hotel is good! https://t.co/FHavRN0Pzg

— Marc Masters 🌵 (@Marcissist) July 30, 2023

I know it’s the wrong thread, but anyone who gets really enthusiastic about Ginsberg is either in high school or knows little about poetry-/ the poems, nor his performance of them, are very good.

xp love a lot of First Blues, esp the version of New York Blues on there

On the shelf in the public area of my daughter’s dorm there seems to be a copy of a Sidney Sheldon novel.

the other side of midnight!

Seems to be a brand new copy. By “the master of the unexpected.”

Another thread asserts that the film version wrecked Marie-France Pisier’s career.

Just returned to the spot. See a ton of Robert B. Parker on there.

Not that he isn't read at all anymore but Oliver Goldsmith was super popular for a long long time. The Vicar of Wakefield was getting anew edition every two or three weeks a hundred years after it was published.

Vicars used to have a much higher Q-Score and were capable of filling the leading-man role without hurting the box office.

Paul Gallico

Already mentioned though, sorry

Have read that, even as he became more of a Slavophile, Dusty was still affected by this French guy; have also read that Karl Marx was a fan:

Marie-Joseph "Eugène" Sue (French pronunciation: [øʒɛn sy]; 26 January 1804 – 3 August 1857) was a French novelist...He was strongly affected by the socialist ideas of the day, and these prompted his most famous works, the anti-Catholic novels: The Mysteries of Paris (Les Mystères de Paris) (published in Journal des débats from 19 June 1842 until 15 October 1843) and The Wandering Jew (Le Juif errant; 10 vols, 1844–1845), which were among the most popular specimens of the serial novel.[4][8] The Wandering Jew is a Gothic novel depicting the titular character in conflict with the villain, a murderous Jesuit named Rodin.[1] These works depicted the intrigues of the nobility and the harsh life of the underclass to a wide public. Les Mystères de Paris spawned a class of imitations all over the world, the city mysteries. Sue's books caused controversy because of their strongly violent scenes, and also because of their socialist and anti-clerical subtexts.[1]

someone asked me about May Sarton today and i said that nobody reads her anymore but i actually have no idea if this is true! it just felt true. this is how fake news gets started.

in my defense, i read a really nice book by Mary Ellen Chase this year. she died in 1973. in lieu of flowers read one of her books.

I recently saw a copy of the Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum and thought of his thread. I know the Bourne films still persist but I never ever see anyone reading the books, and they don't even seem to turn up that often in UK charity shops these days (and they really were all over airport bookshops etc in the 70s/80s).

Do people in the UK still read Hal Caine? Those Manxman/Deemster books were a pretty huge deal at the end of the 19th century.

xp as far as Bourne is concerned he was obviously cash-worthy enough for the publisher to pay Ninja Pulp King Eric van Lustbader to write a bunch of further sequels at one point, tho i have no idea what the state of play is in 2024

that's Sir Hall Caine to you. I've heard of none of these.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/591

Hitchcock adapted one of his novels!