Quote of the Day (John Fowles, on Why Novelists Write)

“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture-makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.” —English novelist, critic and poet John Fowles (1926-2005), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

John Fowles was born 100 years ago today in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex, England. Four of his novels were adapted into movies: The Collector (1965), The Magus (1968), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and, for TV, The Ebony Tower (1984).

Ironically, the one that did not was Daniel Martin (1977), whose title character is an English playwright who becomes a well-paid but dissatisfied Hollywood script doctor.

For nearly 20 years, Fowles landed on the bestseller lists with large novels best characterized as metafictional, psychological, and postmodern. But even during his lifetime attention to him receded (to some extent, probably hastened by a stroke suffered in 1988), and it has only grown more so in the two decades since his death.

The book of his that seems to have the best chance of being continually re-read is The French Lieutenant's Woman, which, like A.S. Byatt’s later Possession, is a historical romance set in the Victorian Era but with a modern narrative voice.

Quote of the Day (William Boyd, on How ‘Novelists Are a Bit Like Spies’)

“Novelists are a bit like spies in the sense that we look at the world with the same kind of forensic attention. Not because we think somebody might be following us or because we’ve given away some secret, but because we’re interested. And so you notice that your neighbor has changed her hairstyle three times in the last month, just as a spy notices the same car has been parked outside for three days.”— British novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and film director William Boyd, quoted by Christian House, “Novelists Are Like Spies,” Financial Times, Sept. 6-7, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of William Boyd, was taken on Feb. 22, 2009, by Michael Fennell.

Quote of the Day (T.C. Boyle, on the Ambitious--Especially Novelists--as ‘Damaged’)

“All of us, especially novelists, are damaged, psychologically damaged. We have big problems, and we are not good people. We’re drug addicts, we’re drunks. So we want to even the score—we want adulation. If you are single-minded, as many writers are, as I am, the work is all you are. There is nothing else. And so if the work goes away, then it’s the gun. We’ve seen it through generations of American writers. That is the downside to ambition.” —Novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle, quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists, WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic. This Month: Ambition,” WSJ.com, March 2015 issue

"All of us"? Glad he's using hyperbole--or, more broadly, creative license. That, or he's moving in a small circle.

(Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Writing as a Jewish American ‘For All Men’)

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel….Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.”— Bernard Malamud interviewed by Daniel Stern in “Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52,” The Paris Review, Spring 1975

You can truly understand the vicissitudes of literary reputations when you consider the reviews of Adam Begley’s new biography of John Updike, which frequently have noted that the late man of letters could sure use a boost among critics these days. The fact that such a fate could befall the prolific and accomplished Updike—long a ubiquitous presence, and only dead five years—makes you appreciate the rather sorry posthumous fate of Bernard Malamud, with nowhere near his output and dead 28 years now. Several years ago, his daughter Jenna, a psychiatrist, came out with a biography in which she frankly admitted to the hope of bringing him back to where he was in the late Seventies: i.e., spoken as one of the "big three" postwar voices of Jewish America, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Janna Malamud Smith’s 2006 bio, My Father is a Book, doesn’t seem to have done the trick, but the time might be right now for her father’s rising critical stock. Anniversaries, for instance, concentrate readers’ and publishers’ attention. Today, as it happens, marks the centennial of the birth of the novelist-short story writer in Brooklyn. Right on time come two volumes from the Library of America—Novels and Stories of the 1940s and 1950s and Novels and Stories of the 1960s—that, in effect, admit him to the American literary pantheon. Now, hopefully, more readers will approach him in the same spirit of astonished delight as Flannery O'Connor, who wrote a friend in 1958: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a book called The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud."

Longtime readers of this blog might recall my prior post on the novel that won Malamud the Pulitzer Prize, The Fixer. But really, I don’t think that comes close to exhausting all that might be written about his carefully calibrated, exquisite prose; his compassion for his suffering characters and suffering humanity as a whole; and his quiet sense of irony and humor.

Malamud’s quote above comes cocooned in all kinds of irony. In the interview from which it came, he spoke of how protégé Philip Roth needed to stop writing so obsessively about his troubled first wife. Roth indeed followed that advice that year: his My Life as a Man, a thinly veiled exorcism of that matrimonial disaster.

Yet you can also practically hear the note of exasperation in Malamud’s voice when he says: “the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.” The best reminder of that is an apprentice novel that, over the years, has become one of his best known: The Natural (1952).

For more than three decades, my admiration for Robert Redford’s Capraesque film adaptation has led me to avoid what I have long known to be Malamud’s far more somber take on baseball. Now, however, I may be in the mood for the original. 

At a basic psychological level, Malamud can probably tell much about why athletes such as Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez could misuse their many, pure gifts to spoil America’s pastime. More broadly, its dominant literary conceit—Roy Hobbs’ New York Knights as a counterpart to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table—can enable us understand the short-lived promise of the Camelot that held sway in the Kennedy White House within a decade of the novel’s publication—as well as why its collapse, amid treachery and tragedy, has proved so traumatic.

Short-story writer-critic Cynthia Ozick gave the correct response to her own question about whether Malamud was "an American Master": "Of course. He augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations....He wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world."

Bonus Quote of the Day (Jason Cowley, on Philip Roth’s Exit From the Writing Scene)

“In November last year, [novelist Philip] Roth declared that he would write no more novels. ‘I’m done,’ he said. Can it really be that this most prolific and prodigiously gifted novelist, this writer who, after his divorce from [British actress Claire] Bloom and retreat to rural Connecticut, began publishing a series of masterpieces in his sixties and seventies, will write no more? There has, I think, been nothing comparable to his late flourishing in the history of Anglo-American letters. It is difficult to accept that this has now come to an end.”—Jason Cowley, “Faces of Roth,” The Financial Times, March 16-17, 2013

Today marks the 80^th birthday of novelist Philip Roth, who burst on the American literary scene in 1959 with a novella and group of short stories collected into Goodbye, Columbus (here is my take on the latter) and who has kept at his desk with a distinctly ascetic, monklike (and un-Portnoyesque) devotion ever since.

If Cowley is to be believed, Roth does not like to be asked about being snubbed for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Well, he wouldn’t be the first that the idiotic nominating committee in Scandinavia has bypassed. (Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Graham Greene can all take their bows now.)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, to His Favorite Teacher)

“I was without a home—a vagabond since I was seven—with two roofs and no home. I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was bursting with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own secretions—groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed, and cheap ugliness—and then I found you, when else I should have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light. Do you think I have forgotten? Do you think I ever will?” —Thomas Wolfe, letter of May 30, 1927, to his former teacher, Margaret Roberts, in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell (1956)

In this season of graduations and moving on from one grade to another, most of us, if we have amounted to anything in life, can remember a teacher who glimpsed possibilities that we never knew we had. Sometimes we tell them what they mean to us; more often, they die or move on to who knows where before we can express what a difference they made in our lives.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one who got the chance to thank his teacher, and as seen above, he did not squander the opportunity. He was a gangling boy of 11 when the Asheville, N.C. schoolteacher Margaret Roberts picked his paper out of 60 in a writing contest and told her husband, “This boy, Tom Wolfe, is a genius! And I want him for our school next year.” For the next four years, at Orange Street School, where her husband John was principal, Margaret fired Wolfe’s imagination. The boy needed that stimulation because his home environment, a boardinghouse called Old Kentucky Home, was so chaotic that Wolfe slept in a different bed each night because of his mother’s need to accommodate visitors.

Wolfe being Wolfe, he had to turn Ms. Roberts into a character, in the novel that made his reputation and made him persona non grata in Asheville for awhile, Look Homeward, Angel. His depiction of her husband as someone who didn’t measure up to his wife’s sensitive spirit hurt her and led to a seven-year break in her friendship with her best student. But they reconciled again before his untimely death.

None of us can summon all the words and thoughts Wolfe showered on "the mother of my spirit." But a thank-you to those holding among the most thankless jobs in the country--the ones who motivated and inspired us when we needed it most--wouldn't hurt.

(The image accompanying this post was taken of Wolfe in 1937 by photographer Carl Van Vechten, and is now part of the Van Vechten Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Ernest Hemingway)

"When you're daydreaming as a child you're Joan of Arc or Richard Coeur de Lion: that's the one pleasure of childhood. But it's supposed to change. Ernest always cast himself in a bigger light. He didn't mythomane down, only up. He had an accurate memory of things you don't mythomane about: scenery, places, names. That worked very well. The scenery was exact and correct, but the hero striding through it was larger than life. Finally, in The Old Man and the Sea, he was a mixture of himself and Christ."-- Martha Gellhorn on ex-husband Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, “Martha Gellhorn,” Granta, Summer 1998

I don’t have HBO, so no, I haven’t seen its movie Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. But it’ll be high on my list when it comes out on DVD. I’m dying to see what they did with the story of the closest thing the 20^th century had to a Byronic hero and the only one of his four wives fully a match for him in writing and adventuring. Maybe that competitive factor also made this the shortest of Papa's marriages.

Well, that’s one reason why it didn’t last. Another was Ernest Hemingway’s talents as a fabulist—one, as I discussed in a prior post, that he shared with Mad Men’s similarly troubled macho man, Don Draper. You would expect that Martha Gellhorn—for whom a prize was named which celebrates “journalism that challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs”—would have a difficult time accepting that in private life, and she did.

It rubbed Gellhorn every kind of wrong way that she was remembered largely as an appendage to her husband, even though she stands in the front rank of reporters of all time. In the contest of egos between herself and the novelist, that stung, and you have to read everything she wrote or said about him with that in mind.

And yet, there’s rough justice in what she told Nicholas Shakespeare about her ex. At the Ernest Hemingway Museum in his native Oak Park, Ill., a surviving piece of his father’s stationery shows makeshift sketches by 2 1/2 –year-old Ernie Hemingway of a giraffe, a sailor, two guns, Noah's ark, a tree, a pipe, and a man on the moon—all testifying to his future love of adventure. He could not accumulate the material for his books without that love. Gellhorn, a woman lied to—and emotionally abused—by this psychologically frail man, had little understanding of her ex’s need.

Still, despite her annoyance, she could not help but admit that there were some things he got right: “scenery, places, names”—an unconscious echo of one of the most famous passages in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates”).

Gellhorn also puts her finger on the problem of Hemingway studies: his corroding ability to sustain a piece of fiction after For Whom the Bell Tolls. The progressive battering taken by his mind and body were key to that deterioration, of course, but just as problematic was his growing capacity for myth-making. True, identifying himself with the protagonists of his fiction allowed him to enter fully into their lives. But there was something disturbing in the way that Hemingway not only identified with Santiago, the simple fisherman hero of The Old Man and the Sea, in his recent lack of good fortune (Santiago has not caught anything much in far too long, while Hemingway’s Over the River and Into the Trees was widely scorned by critics), but also with Christ.

Hemingway’s life, if nothing else, will keep people returning to his books. With the release of the Owen-and-Kidman literary epic, along with an upcoming Mint Theater Co. revival of her 1946 play co-written by Virginia Cowles, Love Goes to Press, we might, at last, also be having a season for Gellhorn. Sometimes truth does work to one’s advantage, after all.

(The photo of Hemingway with Carlos Gutierrez, first mate of his beloved boat Pilar, is from the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)

Quote of the Day (Gore Vidal, on Narcissism)

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”—Gore Vidal, quoted by Michiko Kakutani, "Vidal: 'I'm at the Top of a Very Tiny Heap,'" The New York Times, March 12, 1981