Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

Edmund Wilson, Incompetent Genre Snob

In between books I have to read for work, I’ve sneaked in a few pages of the two-volume Edmund Wilson set recently put out by the Library of America. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, when not defending Hemingway against his political critics or concluding that Intruder in the Dust “contains a kind of counterblast to the anti-lynching bill and to the civil-rights plank in the Democratic platform,” the man was a bit of a douchebag. And I say this as someone who enjoys some of his literary criticism. What’s particularly surprising is how dismissive Wilson is of mysteries.

edmundwilson.jpgStarting with the obnoxious essay, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” Wilson declares, “I got bored with the Thinking Machine and dropped him.” He dismisses two Nero Wolfe books “sketchy and skimpy” and writes of The League of Frightened Men “the solution of the mystery was not usually either fanciful of unexpected,” failing to consider the idea that a good mystery may not be about the destination, but the journey. He declares Agatha Christie’s writing “of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read,” but fails to cite several specific examples, before concluding:

You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion.

If Wilson protests the detective story so much (as he points out, T.S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More were enchanted by the form), why did he bother to write about it at all? Should not an erudite and ethical critic recuse himself when he loathes a particular form?

It gets worse. If caddish generalizations along these lines weren’t enough, he returns to the mystery subject in the essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” written in response to many letters that had poured in from readers hoping to set Wilson straight. He dismisses Dorothy Sanders’s The Nine Tailors, openly confessing:

I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English villa characters: “Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background,” etc.

Aside from the fact that Wilson, in failing to read the whole of the book, didn’t do his job properly, it never occurs to Wilson that Sayers may have been faithfully transcribing the specific manner in which people spoke or that there may actually be something to these “English village characters.” Here’s the full quote from page 57 of Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors:

“Oh, here’s Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background. That’s right, Hinkins. Six in front of this tomb and six the other side — and have you brought those big pickle-jars? They’ll do splendidly for the narcissi….”

In other words, what Wilson has conveniently omitted from his takedown is Sayers pinpointing something very specific about how everyday routine, a fundamental working class component that seems lost upon Wilson despite his Marxism, leads one to disregard the fact that someone has died. Thus, there is a purpose to this conversation.

Yet this is the man being lauded on the back cover of the Library of America volumes as “wide-ranging in his interests.”

Wilson read mysteries for the wrong reasons. He saw trash only because it was what he wanted to see. Wilson’s incompetence is a fine lesson for contemporary readers. A book should be read on its own terms, and it is a critic’s job to try and understand a book as much as she is able to, reserving judgment only when she has fully read the book and after there has been some time to masticate upon the reading experience.

I disagree with Adam Kirsch’s recent assessment that “The best critics, like the best imaginative writers, are not right or wrong — they simply, powerfully are.” A critic, like any other human being, is often wrong, particularly when approaching a book with prejudgment or a fixed notion, such as Wilson did, of a mystery merely being about whodunnit. To avoid being wrong in this way, and to simply exert one’s opinion at the time of reading, requires as much careful reading and accuracy as possible, lest a great novel be thoroughly misperceived. It requires acceptable context and supportive examples. Wilson could not do this with mysteries and, if he is to be lionized, one should be aware that, when it came to Dorothy Sayers, he was no better than Lee Siegel in his tepid reading comprehension.

by Edward Champion

But It Took Him Considerably More Than 14 Minutes to Move On

Chronicle of Higher Education: “Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took Prestigious University Press to reject my proposal to edit a book of new essays on an early-modern philosopher. Apparently that’s the time it took the acquisitions editor to receive my e-mail message, open the 10-page attachment, make a professional judgment, and then write back with a curt one-sentence rejection stating that my proposal was ‘too specialized’ for the press’s successful series of handbooks on individual thinkers. That’s also how long it took me to go into the kitchen, eat a sandwich, and return to my computer to find his reply.”

You know, most of the time, a writer doesn’t get any kind of reply at all.

(via John Fox)

by Edward Champion

A Grand Radio Project

A few perspicacious readers have correctly divined from my post last week that I am indeed interested in doing something on the radio drama front in relation to the short story and that my feverish intake of all things old-time radio has spawned something of a side project. Let me just say that emails have been sent, authors have been contacted, and that scripts are being written.

Rather than keep the details mum, I’d like to invite any interested parties to contact me on this. If you are a voiceover talent, a musician, an author who would like to see her work adapted into a thirty-minute production (at the moment, the project is being helmed by volunteers, which means nobody’s making money at this), a radio writer willing to deal with a hard but encouraging story editor, an audio geek, a sound effects guru, or you’d like to jump on board with this in some other capacity, drop me a line and I’ll see if we can get you on board.

The current and wildly ambitious plan is this: I’d like to do an initial set of ten thirty-minute radio dramas — a tough and socially conscious (but not didactic) contemporary anthology series in the vein of Quiet, Please and Dimension X. Why ten? Well, the idea here is to conduct a mass casting call of talent, find out where their particular character strengths lie, and then cast them accordingly to the roles in the ten scripts we have at our disposal. Each drama would be meticulously rehearsed and then recorded over the course of one day. Trust me on this. You will be challenged, but this will be fun.

I’m shooting to get the initial slate of ten up over the course of ten weeks sometime in early 2008.

Ideally, these dramas will be based on previous material, although I have about twenty or so original story ideas in outline form. I’m now writing one script, a satirical story about disaster and religion, which I’m now about halfway into. At the moment, I’m serving as story editor and director. And I’m hoping to give other writing talents an opportunity to not only see their short stories presented in compelling dramatic form, but also, if they are interested, to either adapt their stories or possibly create new ones.

If any of this interests you, you can email me at ed@edrants.com. Please include samples and a brief history of what you’ve done. If you have a pitch for a story you’d like to write that would be acceptable for a thirty-minute production, email me and we’ll volley. I’ll try to get back to everyone within a week or so.

by Edward Champion

Penguin Audio Afraid to Embrace the Present

The New York Times‘s Andrew Adam Newman reveals jittery spirits at Penguin Audio. Set to offer audio books through eMusic (disclosure: I have freelanced for them), Penguin Audio bailed out at the last minute, fearful of pirates taking the non-DRM MP3s and disseminating them across the Internet. But Random House Audio publisher Madeline McIntosh begs to differ, pointing out that there have been no pirated versions of eMusic-distributed audio books found on pirate sites (at least, not yet).

I’m wondering if Penguin Audio’s “piracy” claim has less to do with uncollected revenue and more to do with enforcing unduly crazy control mechanisms. Penguin Audio may be foolishly trying to enforce autocratic market options on a free market. After all, offer the files only as a DRM option and you control the precise circumstances in which a listener can enjoy an audio book. But the listener will desire to enjoy the audio book on the computer, the iPod, the home stereo, and nearly any appliance that she sees fit to listen. Restricting how a listener decides to enjoy an audio book runs contrary to the “customer is always right” basic business principle.

If this is indeed Penguin’s stance, this would also run counter with the portable nature of regular books, which can be borrowed, swapped, sold at the Strand, or enjoyed in multiple atmospheres. Penguin is also missing out on a few unanticipated promotional options. Even if a small portion of audio books are pirated, there’s also the possibility that a listener might want to buy the book she’s listening to. Indeed, if the audio books become omnipresent, this may translate into a small customer base wanting to purchase the book.

So while Random House Audio struts its stuff on the parquet, Penguin Audio appears content to be the diffident boy at the junior high school prom afraid to ask the girl to dance. Which is a great shame, as there are a lot of interesting titles in the backlist.