Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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!

Also I thank him for this:

It was this book, (The Manxman) published as one volume in August 1894 by Heinemann, that ended the system of three-volume novels.

I'd never heard of Gertrude E. Trevelyan but she fits the thread and sounds interesting:

82 years ago today, Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan, one of the most remarkable novelists of the generation that followed Virginia Woolf, died at her parents' home in Bath of injuries sustained when her flat was bombed during the Blitz. Died—and was utterly forgotten.

A thread. pic.twitter.com/7SQkv87OXH

— Neglected Books (@neglectedbooks) February 22, 2024

xp which Mary Ellen did you read? Silas Crockett rings a bell, so maybe I've seen it--- also like this note:

She taught at Smith College starting in 1926 until her retirement in 1955. She was the lifelong companion of Eleanor Duckett, a medieval scholar whom she met at Smith, and with whom she lived in Northampton until her death. Two adjoining residence halls on the Smith campus are named for Chase and Duckett.[3][1]

i read *Dawn In Lyonesse*. its short. you could read it in a day. i liked it a lot. she had a simple style.

the best book i've read in the last year was *A Country Doctor* by Sarah Orne Jewett. i loved it. it was like 1884 alice munro kinda. don't know how many people read her anymore! i'm sure *The Country of the Pointed Firs* is still in print but i'm guessing when its taught its taught in some kind of medicinal way. for historical importance. regional writing of the late 19th century in america. i could be wrong. she's so readable and entertaining to me.

The Country of the Pointed Firs remained very much a thing when I finished grad school in 2010.

i've just got done reading a memoir/polemic by the english novelist douglas goldring. also a poet, playwright, publisher, lit mag editor, travel writer, tourist guide & journalist, he seems to have known everyone in art and leftist circles during the twenties but the only reference to him i can remember ever seeing was as the publisher of an early story by wyndham lewis. have never come across one of his novels but now keeping an eye out.

are there richard aldington readers out there? another writer of that era whose novels i never see around.

once upon a time i kept meaning to read some. plus the themes were relevant to some stuff i was taking notes on and chewing over. i remember his cycle was being kept in print - yellow spined volumes iirc - but can’t remember who by. was he a bit fash?

wait, i’m getting him confused with… who am i getting him confused with?

henry williamson.

aldington i kept bumping when i used to be in the english language modernists etc, think if anything id have him as a v minor poet, didn’t realise he’d written any novels or if i did know i’ve forgotten.

Edward Dahlberg

No one except skot that is

Burgess picks the whole of Williamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight in his 99 novels selection, while admitting "In the later volumes a pro-Fascist tone prevails, highly disturbing, and an almost manic bitterness which is far from acceptable"!

his son played on some gong related projects iirc

xpost: liked the dahlberg collection i read a few years back!

& xposts: yeah aldington mostly known for his imagist association and biographies of the two lawrences. death of a hero is the only one of his novels that got/gets any attention as far as i know. was even published as a penguin which is why i'm surprised i've never spotted it.

also reading an article about goldring's lit mag turns out it was where a bunch of what would later become lewis's the wild body was first published speaking of fash

The only Williamson I’m curious to read is his unused film treatment for tarka that was 400,000 words long & basically encompassed that whole 15-novel cycle, going through centuries of history of the region before the otter even appears; weirdly the producers ended up going in a different direction. His descendants seem to work extremely hard at whitewashing his more unsavoury traits but even the official website basically intimates it was the scribblings of a demented crackpot