Literature

Flannery O’Connor on reading….

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(Mary Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short works including Wise Blood which is one of my favorite stories in American literature.)

“I didn’t really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time. When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them. Then I began to read everything ay once, so much so that I didn’t have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Greene, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolf (unfair to the dear lady, of course); I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K.A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much as Doestoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction. I have totally skipped such people as Dreiser, Anderson (except for a few stories) and Thomas Wolfe. I have learned something from Hawthorne, Flaubert, Balzac and something from Kafka, though I have never been able to finish one of his novels. I’ve read almost all of Henry James – from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nevertheless. I admire Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. But always the largest thing that looms up is The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure he wrote them all while drunk too.”

From a letter by Flannery O’Connor.

 

Tolstoy and Gorky

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In 1900, two of Russia’s most prominent literary figures, Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, were photographed together at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana. The photograph, taken by Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, captures a significant moment in Russian literary history. Sophia was not only a devoted partner but also a keen photographer, often documenting her husband’s life and interactions with key figures.

By 1900, Tolstoy, the celebrated author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was already a towering figure in world literature, known for his profound philosophical inquiries and moral writings. Gorky, on the other hand, was a rising star in Russian literature, renowned for his works depicting the struggles of the working class and his involvement in revolutionary movements. At the time of their meeting, Gorky was deeply influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas, particularly his humanistic views, and saw him as a moral authority.

Yasnaya Polyana, located in Tula Province, was more than just Tolstoy’s residence; it served as his intellectual haven and a place where many significant conversations and philosophical debates took place. The meeting between the two writers at this retreat marked an important moment of literary exchange, symbolizing the passing of the literary torch from the established Tolstoy to the younger, more revolutionary Gorky. The photo not only documents their personal connection but also reflects the intellectual and cultural landscape of Russia at the turn of the 20th century.

~Charlotte Emma

 

Zora Neale Hurston

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It was once said of Mary Ann Evans (the English novelist who, under the pen name George Eliot, wrote the classics Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner) that “when you read her work, you knew you’re in the hands of genius.”

The same can be said of Zora Neale Hurston, author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

From the very first, you realize that she is an extraordinary literary genius. You watch as a miracle unfolds across the pages. The flux and vivid detail of her imagery is not only truly original, but at times, the multi-layered meanings, subtle double entendres and the exquisite use of language approaches that of any writer I have ever read.

I found myself rereading some of her narrative passages seven or eight times to savor their excellence.

This woman is a novelist with a poetess living inside her who rushes to the forefront of the narrative at the most unexpected moments. In experiencing this book, you will be reading a long passage which has been driving forward at a slow, steady pace then suddenly launches into pure poetry.

For example, early on, Hurston describes the porch-sitters, the old busybody black women who huddle together on front porches and gossip about everyone that passes. This is how Hurston describes them:

“These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became Lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouth. They sat in judgment.”

When the book was first released in 1937, the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals objected strongly to her use of dialect. Here’s an example of dialogue in the book:

“Naw, Ah thank yuh. Nothin’ couldn’t ketch dese few steps Ah’m going. Anyhow mah husband tell me say no first class booger would have me. If she got anything to tell yuh, you’ll hear it.”

The Harlem intellectuals felt it was wrong to depict black folks talking in dialect. They felt it presented blacks in an inferior, truly unflattering light. Hurston could have cared less. Unlike the Harlem crowd who only wanted to enumerate and seek justice for the white man’s cruelty to the black man, Hurston wanted to present black people exactly as they were.

She had no interest in sugar-coating the life and culture of her people. She wanted to get as close to the truth as she could. Once you start reading, you see immediately how and why the use of dialect helped achieve this special truth.

If you like muscular, vibrant prose which lays bare the very heart and soul of black culture in the deep South during the twenties and thirties, you’ll love this book. Watching Hurston’s literary genius bend and swing with the rhythm of the narrative is truly a literary miracle to behold!!!

Breath-taking imagery! Great read! I will never forget the love story of Janie and Tea Cake.

Now I know why Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, said: “There is no book more important to me than this one!”

Majestic book!! Absolutely magnificent!!

Honore de Balzac… the Greatest Novelist?

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In the early sixties, a group of well-known literary pundits got together to decide who were the greatest novelists of all time.

Their conclusion was that Leo Tolstoy wrote the greatest novel in “War and Peace”, but they also decided that the French novelist Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist simply because he produced so many good novels in his lifetime.

It was a well-deserved honor. Balzac not only had an incredibly prodigious output but a fire and ambition as a literary artist which is seldom seen in human history.

Born in Tours in 1799, Balzac’s father was a member of the upper class and had been a regional administrator during the French Revolution. The father had hoped that Balzac would enter the legal profession and, as a young man, he studied law first at the College de Vendome and later at the Sorbonne.

Despite his father’s wishes, Balzac was too restless and ambitious for such a staid profession and, in 1819, at the age of 20, he announced he wanted to be a writer. With that, he moved to Paris and installed himself in a shabby garret at 9 rue Lediguiéres.

As a chronicler for local magazines on social and artistic subjects, Balzac’s early writing attempts met with mediocre success although he did receive some recognition for the novel Les Chouans, a historical potboiler in the tradition of Sir Water Scott, in 1829. During that period, Balzac unfortunately tried his hand at business and bought a publishing house which failed to bring in printing.

After this and several other business ventures failed, Balzac was left with a heavy debt burden which would plague him until the end of his career. “All happiness depends on courage and work,” Balzac once said. “I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.”

In 1832, he began corresponding with a beautiful, wealthy Polish woman (she claimed to be a countess) named Eveline Hanska. Early on, he became enamored of her and asked her to marry him. She replied that she would marry him only if he became rich and famous.

With that, Balzac set off on a furious pace to write as many novels as fast as he could. His work habits were legendary. Balzac wrote standing up, dressed in a monk’s robe, drinking pot after pot of Turkish coffee. Many days, he would write for 15 hours straight, sleep for a few hours and then write for another 15 hours.

Balzac was close friends with French novelist Alexandre Dumas and he often visited their home to discuss literature. In the wee hours of the morning, Balzac, hungry and dog-tired, would visit and ask for food and a place to nap. Dumas’ wife would fix up a concoction of whipped butter and sardines that Balzac loved, then he would lie down for a nap.

Before he started to nap, he would tell Dumas’ wife: ”Now I only want to sleep for one hour, then wake me up.” After an hour, Dumas’ wife, knowing how he had pushed himself beyond the bounds of human endurance, would let him sleep for two hours.

When Balzac would wake up, he would see the time and curse Dumas’ wife and exclaim: ”You crazy woman, you let me sleep for 2 hours. I could have written a novel in that hour.” With that, he would storm out of the house and return to his garret to write for another 15 hours.

Over the next 17 years, he wrote an incredible 90 novels. About the time he proposed to Eveline Hanska, he decided to encompass all of his writings under a larger framework entitled “The Human Comedy”. This massive undertaking would include more than 2000 characters in 90 novels and novellas.

The overall series would present a sprawling portrait of the habits, social customs and atmosphere of bourgeois France during his lifetime. The most famous titles in the series were La Peau de chagrin (1831), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835, his most famous novel) Les Illusions perdues (1837I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843), La Cousine Bette (1846) and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847).

By October 1848, Balzac was world famous and wealthy and traveled to the Ukraine to try to win the hand of Madame Hanska again. Finally, after seeing that he was everything she had hoped for, she agreed to marry him. They were married in March of 1850.

Shortly afterward, Balzac wrote a friend: “Three days ago I married the only woman I have ever loved.” Two weeks later, he triumphantly returned to Paris with his new wife.

But the years of overwork and stress had caused his health to fail and, in mid-August of 1850, Balzac lay on his deathbed. French literary greats Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were at his bedside as he lay dying.

It has been said that, as he lay dying in one room at their Paris home, his new wife–the woman he had spent his life trying to win– was in an adjacent room in bed with some stable boy she had picked up on the street. So much for true love.

At the funeral, Hugo delivered the eulogy. The great novelist noted: “Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from controversies and enmities….. Henceforward he will shine far above all those clouds which float over our heads, among the brightest stars of his native land.”

Review of A Gathering of Old Men

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A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines examines the complex relationships between whites and blacks during the early 1970s in rural Cajun Country Louisiana.

Gaines’ portrayals of his characters come across as earthly, warm and as human as the Louisiana countryside itself.

The title of each chapter names the person who is narrating it and the story unfolds logically and gracefully as a result of this technique.

Each story sequence is plotted completely and the cinematic narrative style is uniquely Gaines. A rich, glorious story of human as well as race relations.

Next I will launch into his Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

Well worth the read!!

Zora Neale Hurston

by

It was once said of Mary Ann Evans (the English novelist who, under the pen name George Eliot, wrote the classics Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner) that “when you read her work, you knew you’re in the hands of genius.”

The same can be said of Zora Neale Hurston, author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

From the very first, you realize that she is an extraordinary literary genius. You watch as a miracle unfolds across the pages. The flux and vivid detail of her imagery is not only truly original, but at times, the multi-layered meanings, subtle double entendres and the exquisite use of language approaches that of any writer I have ever read.

I found myself rereading some of her narrative passages seven or eight times to savor their excellence.

This woman is a novelist with a poetess living inside her who rushes to the forefront of the narrative at the most unexpected moments. In experiencing this book, you will be reading a long passage which has been driving forward at a slow, steady pace then suddenly launches into pure poetry.

For example, early on, Hurston describes the porch-sitters, the old busybody black women who huddle together on front porches and gossip about everyone that passes. This is how Hurston describes them:

“These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became Lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouth. They sat in judgment.”

When the book was first released in 1937, the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals objected strongly to her use of dialect. Here’s an example of dialogue in the book:

“Naw, Ah thank yuh. Nothin’ couldn’t ketch dese few steps Ah’m going. Anyhow mah husband tell me say no first class booger would have me. If she got anything to tell yuh, you’ll hear it.”

The Harlem intellectuals felt it was wrong to depict black folks talking in dialect. They felt it presented blacks in an inferior, truly unflattering light. Hurston could have cared less. Unlike the Harlem crowd who only wanted to enumerate and seek justice for the white man’s cruelty to the black man, Hurston wanted to present black people exactly as they were.

She had no interest in sugar-coating the life and culture of her people. She wanted to get as close to the truth as she could. Once you start reading, you see immediately how and why the use of dialect helped achieve this special truth.

If you like muscular, vibrant prose which lays bare the very heart and soul of black culture in the deep South during the twenties and thirties, you’ll love this book. Watching Hurston’s literary genius bend and swing with the rhythm of the narrative is truly a literary miracle to behold!!!

Breath-taking imagery! Great read! I will never forget the love story of Janie and Tea Cake.

Now I know why Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, said: “There is no book more important to me than this one!”

Majestic book!! Absolutely magnificent!!

Honore de Balzac – The Greatest Novelist

by
Honore de Balzac

In the early sixties, a group of well-known literary pundits got together to decide who were the greatest novelists of all time. Their conclusion was that Leo Tolstoy wrote the greatest novel in “War and Peace”, but they also decided that the French novelist Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist simply because he produced so many good novels in his lifetime.

It was a well-deserved honor. Balzac not only had an incredibly prodigious output but a fire and ambition as a literary artist which is seldom seen in human history.

Born in Tours in 1799, Balzac’s father was a member of the upper class and had been a regional administrator during the French Revolution. The father had hoped that Balzac would enter the legal profession and, as a young man, he studied law first at the College de Vendome and later at the Sorbonne.

Despite his father’s wishes, Balzac was too restless and ambitious for such a staid profession and, in 1819, at the age of 20, he announced he wanted to be a writer. With that, he moved to Paris and installed himself in a shabby garret at 9 rue Lediguiéres.

As a chronicler for local magazines on social and artistic subjects, Balzac’s early writing attempts met with mediocre success although he did receive some recognition for the novel Les Chouans, a historical potboiler in the tradition of Sir Water Scott, in 1829. During that period, Balzac unfortunately tried his hand at business and bought a publishing house which failed to bring in printing.

After this and several other business ventures failed, Balzac was left with a heavy debt burden which would plague him until the end of his career. “All happiness depends on courage and work,” Balzac once said. “I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.”

In 1832, he began corresponding with a beautiful, wealthy Polish woman (she claimed to be a countess) named Eveline Hanska. Early on, he became enamored of her and asked her to marry him. She replied that she would marry him only if he became rich and famous.

With that, Balzac set off on a furious pace to write as many novels as fast as he could. His work habits were legendary. Balzac wrote standing up, dressed in a monk’s robe, drinking pot after pot of Turkish coffee. Many days, he would write for 15 hours straight, sleep for a few hours and then write for another 15 hours.

Balzac was close friends with French novelist Alexandre Dumas and he often visited their home to discuss literature. In the wee hours of the morning, Balzac, hungry and dog-tired, would visit and ask for food and a place to nap. Dumas’ wife would fix up a concoction of whipped butter and sardines that Balzac loved, then he would lie down for a nap.

Before he started to nap, he would tell Dumas’ wife: ”Now I only want to sleep for one hour, then wake me up.” After an hour, Dumas’ wife, knowing how he had pushed himself beyond the bounds of human endurance, would let him sleep for two hours.

When Balzac would wake up, he would see the time and curse Dumas’ wife and exclaim: ”You crazy woman, you let me sleep for 2 hours. I could have written a novel in that hour.” With that, he would storm out of the house and return to his garret to write for another 15 hours.

Over the next 17 years, he wrote an incredible 90 novels. About the time he proposed to Eveline Hanska, he decided to encompass all of his writings under a larger framework entitled “The Human Comedy”. This massive undertaking would include more than 2000 characters in 90 novels and novellas.

The overall series would present a sprawling portrait of the habits, social customs and atmosphere of bourgeois France during his lifetime. The most famous titles in the series were La Peau de chagrin (1831), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835, his most famous novel) Les Illusions perdues (1837I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843), La Cousine Bette (1846) and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847).

By October 1848, Balzac was world famous and wealthy and traveled to the Ukraine to try to win the hand of Madame Hanska again. Finally, after seeing that he was everything she had hoped for, she agreed to marry him. They were married in March of 1850.

Shortly afterward, Balzac wrote a friend: “Three days ago I married the only woman I have ever loved.” Two weeks later, he triumphantly returned to Paris with his new wife.

But the years of overwork and stress had caused his health to fail and, in mid-August of 1850, Balzac lay on his deathbed. French literary greats Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were at his bedside as he lay dying.

It has been said that, as he lay dying in one room at their Paris home, his new wife–the woman he had spent his life trying to win– was in an adjacent room in bed with some stable boy she had picked up on the street. So much for true love.

At the funeral, Hugo delivered the eulogy. The great novelist noted: “Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from controversies and enmities….. Henceforward he will shine far above all those clouds which float over our heads, among the brightest stars of his native land.”