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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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Before you read this, perhaps you would like to read Section One, Section Two, and Section Three. - - - - DE: The main thrust of the piece is that Trilling, the vaunted literary critic, in his diaries lamented, in a really sad and desperate way, the direction of his life. He was bored by academia, bored by his peers, didn't even consider them men. Then, in a wrenching couple of passages, he wishes fairly openly that he had the guts to be a writer, had the guts to just lay it out there, had the guts, in short, to be Hemingway. The two men really couldn't have been more opposite, one a buttoned-up college professor (who didn't like teaching much, it turns out), ensconced in his university environs, a writer of books about writers. The other was out there, taking his lumps, traveling, writing bad and great books, being always celebrated and always torn apart by people not so much unlike Trilling himself. And all the while, it turns out that what I imagine what were Hemingway's suspicions—that his critics wanted to be him—was, at least in Trilling's case, absolutely true. And the tragedy is twofold. First, Trilling is trapped because the older he gets, the less able he is, according to his journal, to make the leap. And either in spite of this or because of it, he never makes public his lament, his shame at devoting all his energies to dissecting the work of others. And thus he continues the animosity between his coterie and those like Hemingway. But that's not to say that Trilling didn't contribute a great deal to the appreciation of the art. So much of his work celebrated his subjects..... Anyway. A funny thing: I was watching Dont Look Back recently, the documentary about Dylan in the mid-60s, and was just loving his conversation with the poor snaggle-toothed British reporter from some huge magazine, I can't remember which. So the interviewer-man was in his sixties, and was asking Dylan some ridiculous questions, and Dylan saw the utter futility in the whole endeavor. Here was Dylan, performing for thousands every night all over England, and this man, for whom none of Dylan's message could really resonate, is the one explaining Dylan to a mass readership. And surely this writer was going to express his doubts about Dylan — he asked Dylan something inane like "Do you care about the words you sing?" — even though he'd spent only twenty minutes in Dylan's company, and watched one show. But still he feels compelled, like the style writer/reviewer mentioned above, to insert himself between an artist and his audience, calling the former a charlatan and the latter his dupes. It makes as much sense as me walking into the interviewer-man's home and, after tea and crumpets, calling his marriage a sham. It's completely absurd. First, it would be much too huge a responsibility to take on in 450 words. Second, I'm certainly the wrong man for the job. The fair and decent thing to do would be to say, Well, the man and his wife have lived together for 40 years, and their house is red. I can state facts, but to make a judgment based on my glance into their lives is a terrible crime, and reveals the judger as a dillettante, and possibly deranged to boot. Of course, history has had its way with the snaggle-toothed writer. He's gone and Dylan lives, and will always live, of course, whether it's fashionable to like him or not, and his music still is played every single minute of every single day, around the world, while the 450-word magazine piece that sought to dismantle him was forgotten, by all including its writer, hours after it was published. JL: First, from Auberon Waugh's obituary, in today's NY Times (incidentally, Times obituaries are my favorite affirmation of life's absolute ratification of energy and passion and endurance. So many you thought you knew or had never heard of until their death turns out to be the whole world in miniature — stories unfolding before and after the moment or two which made them famous enough for the obituary. The drama of effort, failure, career switches, apprenticeships, etc.). Waugh said "Vituperation is not a philosophy of life nor an answer to all life's ills. It is merely a tool, a device, a part of life's rich pageant, and in the right hands a happy part of life's pageant, a salutary tool." Greil Marcus, from his review of Dylan's Self-Portrait: "What is this shit?" and "I always said I'd even buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I never said I'd buy one of him breathing lightly." (These quotes are from memory, I don't have it in front of me.) Critic as bullshit detector. Lester Bangs in here somewhere too. The passionate advocate for the audience's hope and disappointment, turning the drama of his own response into a form of literature of its own.The art of vituperation. Further, the Killing-the-Father impulse which energizes so much art. Dylan: "I killed Tin Pan Alley. It's dead."
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