Tag / Dead Writer’s Almanac

by Edward Champion

The Dead Writer’s Almanac (April 26, 2010)

It’s the death day of Hubert Selby, Jr., who passed away six years ago on April 26, 2004. Selby died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was the sixth leading cause of death in 1990 and is well on its way to earning a solid position as the fourth leading cause of death in 2030. (Go lung disease! And don’t forget, fellow writers. Smoke ’em if you got ’em!) Selby’s wife, Suzanne, claimed that Hubert screamed and broke things when he wasn’t writing. This may explain, in part, the enhanced intensity and the staggered paragraph indentation of his best-known works: 1964’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (which features such street talk as “A couplea creeps wouldnt giveus the packages they got from home so we dumpedem. Im tellinya, we was real tight man”), 1971’s The Room, which deals with a criminally insane man recounting his past in a locked room, and 1978’s Requiem for a Dream, a fun-filled romp that involves broken families, drugs, and ECT. Selby later adapted Requiem with Darren Aronofsky (good man, one of the rare filmmakers who actually enlisted the writer) into an unsettling motion picture that has depressed several people and, for all we know, has inspired several suicides. Which is what great art should do sometimes.

It was thought by many (or at least by the Dead Writer’s Almanac staff) that death would at long last secure the literary respect that had eluded Selby for so damn long. I mean, even a humorless stuffed shirt like Albert Mobilio thought to name-check Selby in (of all things) a 2000 review of a Simona Vinci book. But Selby isn’t quite on the level of Charles Bukowski. Epicene hipsters, often mumbling around in their early twenties, don’t seem to place his slim and gritty volumes upon their coffee tables to atone for a shortfall in streetcred and masculinity.

On the other hand, Selby was often thought “dead” even as he was alive. As he told an interviewer in 2002, “Yes, I’ve been given up for dead many times. In 1988, two doctors said that, according to all accepted medical evidence, I’m dead [enormous laugh].” (Somehow, the “enormous laugh” ensnared within brackets doesn’t truly convey the irony that Selby intended. But if you close your eyes for a smidgen, I’m sure you can imagine being marginalized and misunderstood.)

Selby was very clear to point out to liberal arts grads who skimmed his novels that the great American dream will “kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer.” That he offered no alternative to the con is to his great credit. And it seems only fitting to end this installment with a clip of a very nervous Terry Gross attempting to soothe a man (“Because you were very sick….”) who merely needed his typewriter to negotiate the savage American wasteland:

Stay writing, don’t die too early, and keep in touch!

by Edward Champion

The Dead Writer’s Almanac (April 25, 2010)

It’s the death day of Wright Morris, who passed away twelve years ago on April 25, 1998. Back in 1910, this famed Nebraskan writer (the second dead Nebraskan writer we’ve celebrated in two days!) had not yet uttered his first word. He then experienced the first death of a loved one. This created a moment for the young Morris to gnaw upon repeatedly in later years. Morris’s mother had died just six days (not even a week!) after young Wright popped out of her womb. In his autobiography, Writing My Life, Wright Morris claimed that, had his mother lived, “my compass would have been set on a different course, and my sails full of more than the winds of fiction.” Well, fellow writers, we must ask ourselves whether Morris’s needle would have been zeroed to an alternative lodestone, had the fates granted him opportunity to mutter “Mama” to the genuine article.

Had Grace Osborn observed her son’s seventh day of life (and many more days beyond), would Morris have become a writer? Grace Osborn was not a deity, but might her mortal sacrifice be perceived as an altogether different form of rest on the seventh day? Would Morris have drifted into another occupation had his mother been hale and hearty? These what-if questions are difficult to address, because all of the involved parties are now dead.

But The Dead Writer’s Almanac’s staff doesn’t view mortality as a liability. Books helped Morris to come to terms with the role that the dead play among the living. In an interview with David Madden, which can be found within the book Conversations with Wright Morris, Morris remarked:

When I began to reread Joyce’s “The Dead,” to see how he achieved — and more successfully than I did — this concept that the dead are always with us, frequently overshadowing the living, I realized that the dead on one level or another constitute our present, whether we will it or not. In certain cultural sensibilities, the dominance of the dead is what constitutes the culture, even to the point of stagnation. Joyce was convinced that the awareness of the presence of the dead with the living is really what makes up civilized behavior and civilized responses. The “presence” of those who are missing, who are physically absent, is the one immortality we can attest to.

And yet a New York Times book reviews search reveals that Wright Morris has not been mentioned once since August 13, 1999. Does the New York Times maintain a policy of not citing a dead writer in its pages after eighteen months of steadfast maggot chewing? If so, this is a great pity. And not just for the maggots. Perhaps the New York Times does not share Morris’s Joycean viewpoint. Perhaps the ostensible paper of record is prejudiced against writers who dare to experiment with photo-text collages. Whatever the Gray Lady’s reasons, we remain quite giddy in celebrating the Cornhusker State’s forgotten literary history two days in a row!

In looking for specific ways in which Morris used the word “dead,” one discovers a concern for capturing “dead” in plainspoken vernacular. “Most of us are dead and gone, think it would be fadin’!” says a character in The Home Place, “Same as me an’ you are fadin’.” And in One Day, Morris writes, “The dead were believed not to matter. Only this immaterial ghost.” On the contrary, Mr. Morris, you matter very much to us! And we hope that our enthusiasm has exhumed you from your needlessly obscure coffin!

Stay writing, don’t die too early, and keep in touch!

by Edward Champion

The Dead Writer’s Almanac (April 24, 2010)

It’s the death day of Willa Cather, who passed away sixty-three years ago on April 24, 1947. The word “dead” can be found seven times in Cather’s O Pioneers!, which was written when Cather resided in Cherry Valley, New York. According to the 2000 Census, Cherry Valley has a population of 1,266 — a number that might be considered “dead” by self-important urbanites, but that is perfectly respectable in this writer’s humble opinion. Cather also wrote a novel called Death Comes for the Archbishop (more “deads” here than O Pioneers!), which is listed on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list.

Cather died from a cerebral hemorrhage in a Park Avenue apartment she shared with journalist Edith Lewis (also Nebraskan and also dead, but not on April 24). According to Lewis, Cather was “never more herself than on the last morning of her life; her spirit was high, her grasp of reality as firm as always.” Lewis remains mum on whether Cather was “never more herself” after the cerebral hemorrhage. But I suspect that, discounting any religious beliefs some of you fellow writers may have, Cather’s spirit did not quite rise to the previous morning’s apotheosis.

The two women lived together for four decades. Some scholars have speculated that there was more going on than a super-intense friendship. But since the two women are both dead, I don’t believe it’s germane for us to contemplate if they were Sapphic exemplars or friends with really nice benefits. What Cather and Lewis did was their business. And if they wished to take it to the grave, this was their choice.

Lewis wrote a book called Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, revealing that, as a teenager, Cather read Latin with Billy Ducker. Lewis writes that, shortly after Ducker and Cather had gone for a walk, Ducker was found dead on the couch in his living room, with a copy of the Iliad lying open on the floor. Cather had an innate distrust of modern science, in large part because it had created numerous weapons that permitted human beings to kill each other more efficiently. Let us therefore dispense with reasonable conclusions and narrow the cause of this death to two possibilities: either Homer killed Ducker or Cather killed Ducker. Lewis reported that one of the last things Ducker said to Cather was “It is just as though the lights were going out, Willie.” For those writers wishing to draw further conclusions about this anecdote, I recommend listening to this Journey song, replacing “city” with “Nebraska.”

Stay writing, don’t die too early, and keep in touch!