Reading the Orton letters I was reminded that Brian O’Nolan debuted his pseudonym “Flann O’Brien” in a 1939 letter to the Irish Times. Over the course of a year, and with help from friends, O’Nolan carried on several debates on the letters page of the paper, which proved so popular with readers that the editor invited him to write a column.

(Not a bad note to end a Friday on. Next week I plan to shake my late tendency to long quotation.)

Sir,

I was interested in “H.P.’s” saucy letter yesterday commenting on the poor attendances at the Gate Theatre’s presentation of The Three Sisters. He is right when he suggests that overmuch Gaelic and Christianity, inextricably and inexplicably mixed up with an overweening fondness for exotic picture palaces, effectively prevent the majority of our people from penetrating further north than the Parnell monument. Heigho for the golden days I spent as a youth in Manchester! In that civilized city we had Chekhov twice nightly in the music-halls; the welkin rang all day long from non-stop open-air Hamlets in city parks, and the suicide rate reached an all-time high from the amount of Ibsen and Strindberg that was going on night and day in a thousand back-street repertory dives. One politely mentioned one’s view on Dick Wagner when borrowing a light from a stranger, and barmaids accepted a chuck under the chin only when it was accompanied by a soft phrase by Pirandello. Nowhere in the world outside Sheffield could the mind glut itself on so much buckshee literary truck.

Hard as “H.P.” may be pressed, I think I can claim to endure more agony than he from having to live in Ireland. Looking back over a lifetime spent in the world of books, I think I have reason to be despondent. I was one of the first readers of John O’London’s Weekly, and can claim that I have never seen an American moving picture. As a lad I knew Ibsen. He was a morose man, bovine of head at all times, and formidable in stature when he was not sitting down. He was objectionable in many ways, and only his great genius and heart of gold saved him from being excluded from decent society. Once I noticed at table that there was dandruff in his tea. Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors at my grandfather’s place, and their long discussions on George Moore were a fair treat to listen to. The recollection of these evenings around the rustic tea-table in the back garden is still almost acutely pleasurable, and is like a fur on the walls of my memory . . .

Yours, etc.,
F. O’Brien
Dublin

_________________________________

Sir,

I feel compelled to attract attention to certain inaccuracies in a letter addressed to you on the 3 inst, by Mr. F. O’Brien, in which the writer assumes an easy familiarity with Ibsen and his contemporaries. Mr. O’Brien may well be an old man, as he says himself, and judging from the pedestrian quality of his style, I see no reason to doubt his probity on this score; but this is one occasion when mere senility cannot be accepted as an excuse for ignorance. He has painted a word-picture of the great man that reflects very little credit either on Ibsen or on himself, and it is partly to clear the name of my favorite playwright, and partly, let it be added, to test Mr. O’Brien’s honesty, that I charge my pen to reply . . .

Yours, etc.,
Lir O’Connor
Dublin

From Myles Before Myles, ed. John Wyse Jackson.

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Enough said here on this subject already, perhaps. But I did want to draw your attention to two wonderful pieces in today’s Trib and (via TEV) the San Francisco Chronicle. The Trib quotes Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, and Farrell biographer Robert K. Landers.

Many years later, the celebrated author Doris Lessing, raised in Africa and a London resident, visited Chicago. Roger Ebert helped show her around, as the Sun-Times’ film critic recalled in a column when Farrell died, a quarter of a century ago:”Well, what I’d really like to see in Chicago,” Lessing said, “is the park bench in Jackson Park where Studs Lonigan kissed Lucy Scanlon for the first time.”

The Sun-Times, on the other hand, doesn’t mark the day at all. As Yeats would say: You’ve disgraced yourselves again.

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Now that everyone’s finished talking about the Amazon glitch, I can address the subject. (In addition to being a hedgehog, I’m also a long now kind of person. A further handicap for a blogger.) Anyhow, the whole thing reminded me of Joe Orton’s practice of writing letters to newspapers under various pseudonyms, to both attack and praise his own plays (courtesy of South Coast Rep):

Joe Orton invented the pseudonym “Edna Welthorpe” in the mid-’50s to create mischief and satirize suburban tastes . . . In response to Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Orton was not satisfied to unleash “Edna” alone. He created a correspondence between several fictional audience members to debate the worthiness of the play. The following are Orton’s anonymous and satirical critical responses to his own play.

MR. SLOANE
Sir — In finding so much to praise in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which seems to be nothing more than a highly sensationalized, lurid, crude and over-dramatized picture of life at its lowest, surely your drama critic has taken leave of his senses.

The effect this nauseating work had on me was to make me want to fill my lungs with some fresh, wholesome, Leicester Square air. A distinguished critic, if I quote him correctly, felt the sensation of snakes swarming around his ankles while watching it.

Yours Truly,
Peter Pinnell

NAUSEATED
Sir — As a playgoer of forty years standing, may I say that I heartily agree with Peter Pinnell in his condemnation of Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humor!

Today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to flaunt their contempt for ordinary decent people. I hope that the ordinary decent people of this country will shortly strike back!

Yours truly,
Edna Welthorpe (Mrs.)

ARISING FROM MR. SLOANE
Sir — Two points arise from Mrs. Edna Welthorpe’s letter regarding Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

One is that everyone is perfectly entitled to like or dislike a play — on any subject — according to personal taste, which is why there is such a wide range of theatrical fare available in London at the moment. Some people are, however, more fortunate than others in their ability to enjoy a wider field of subjects, and it is surely not for the more “blinkered” citizens to censure them for that.

Secondly, I cannot recall a successful play — from, say, Othello to St. Joan, from Tamburlaine to Look Back in Anger — which concerned itself with “ordinary, decent people”! One agrees that the ordinary, decent people are the salt of the earth and the backbone of the country — but they do not make subjects for exciting, stimulating and controversial dramas.

Yours faithfully,
John A. Carlsen

UNTITLED
Sir — What, not one word in favour of poor Mr. Sloane? Well, here goes: I myself consider — a) the dialogue quite brilliant; b) the comedy breathtaking; c) the drama satisfying; d) the play as a whole well-written if not profound; e) let us, however, exhort Mr. Orton to turn his gaze higher. As Oscar Wilde said in another context, “Some of us are walking in the gutter, but we can look at the stars!”

Yours faithfully,
Alan Crosby

Source: The Orton Diaries. Lahr, John, ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1986

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Somehow this slipped past my compulsive coverage of Hugh Kenner’s passing. It came a month later than the others, and it’s from one of my erstwhile heroes, Guy Davenport (via graywyvern).

Hugh’s prose remains the envy of everybody who has ever tried to write. It is elegant in its hard simplicity, in its diction, and in its adherence to tradition. It modulated from book to book. The compact density of his first Joyce book gave way to the fluid periods of The Pound Era. The Beckett book is written in Beckett. In later books he took to hiding perfectly invisible poems inside the prose: a Yeatsian sonnet, a limerick, a lively lyric in the book about Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner. This last sticks out; only the dullest reader could miss it. The others are discreetly hidden, and yet they are there. I have a feeling that most of Hugh’s prose is on two levels. The upper one is as clear and forthright as Hazlitt; the second one is Hugh talking to himself more intelligently than he is willing to share with a half-literate public.

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Paul Muldoon has a poem, Soccer Moms, in the Feb 16 & 23 New Yorker (not available online). Seems a bit of a departure for him; almost Larkinesque. Here’s a little bit:

for three weeks only in 1962 might have taught them to shield
themselves against the lives their daughters briefly relive,
as it seemed their hearts might be first to yield

to this free kick that forever curls
past the goal mouth, a ball at once winging into the back of the net
and winning.

Check it out - you might find it still on the newsstand. Also check out, while you’re at it, the Complete Review’s wonderfully complete Paul Muldoon pages.

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Today I finally managed to listen to the archive recordings from last month’s series on Chicago Public Radio, Should I Stay or Should I Go. The literary panel discussion was pretty interesting. I particularly enjoyed this exchange between novelist Aleksander Hemon and Dalkey Archive founder John O’Brien:

HEMON: [In New York] there is a culture of glamour around literature and writing. Chicago — look outside — it’s devoid of false glamour. I love Chicago, but the fact of the matter is that this is the world capital of brutal capitalism. It has been such for a couple of centuries . . . If you want to write about middle-class divorce, New York is probably the place for you. But if you want to write about the ways in which people enter a society and get scarred by that entrance, if you want to write about people looking for a job, and not in the publishing industry, then Chicago is probably a better place. Precisely because it’s a conflictual place, this is not a harmonious place, everyone can see that, at any level: racially, as far as class conflicts are concerned, as far as writers . . .

O’BRIEN: . . . I think [the issue] you’re raising is, there is a kind of Chicago aesthetic. It’s an aesthetic that’s out in the streets, I don’t see it very much in the literature. I’ve never really thought about it until you started talking about it . . . There should be a sense of writing, that is a Chicago writing, a style of writing that comes out of what that city’s like, and it’s a city that’s very different from all other cities. I don’t see it. You could see it Nelson Algren’s writing, and at times maybe in Saul Bellow’s writing. But generally nobody ever talks about a Chicago style. You can certainly talk about a New York style, which is a style as well as a subject matter.

You can listen to the whole discussion here. Also check out the segment in which Stuart Dybek takes host Judy Valente on a walking tour through his old neighborhood.

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Ron Hogan at Beatrice.com gives a splendid account of the Farrell tribute in New York last night. That Library of America volume is a must-buy.

Finally, Pete Hamill admitted he’d never met Farrell but did correspond with him, receiving letters with handwriting “like he stuck his finger in an electric outlet.” He read Farrell for the first time as a 16-year-old sheetmetal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, having bought a cheap Signet paperback with a “hot painting” on the cover and flap copy emphasizing the “steamy” content. Rereading Farrell recently, he said he was impressed by the subtleties of the prose, then described Farrell as “the first Irish-American novelist,” making an intriguing comparison between Studs Lonigan and Stephen Dedalus. Towards the end, he mused aloud about Farrell’s fade into obscurity, quoting William Dean Howells’ advice to Edith Wharton: “Americans only want tragedies with happy endings.”

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A few other items from recent days:

* Random House does a better job than most publishers of listing author readings on their website. You can search by state: here’s the current list for Illinois.

* The New Yorker’s list of nationwide events (The New Yorker Near You) includes a fair number of events this week. I don’t think Ben Greenman’s appearance in Chicago March 25 has even been announced locally yet.

* Also in the New Yorker, in the Above and Beyond column, I notice that tonight “The writers Norman Mailer and Pete Hamill join the actor Kevin McCarthy, the cultural historian Ann Douglas, and others for a centennial celebration of James T. Farrell, the author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. (New York Public Library, 6:30 pm.)” No such celebration planned in Chicago, far as I know.

* Graham Greene’s mistress Yvonne Cloetta has a memoir coming out. The book’s aims include “rescuing him from posthumous detractors.” I was interested to see that the translation is by Euan Cameron, whose work on Bizot’s The Gate I thought was absolutely terrific.

* What’s with the Grove/Atlantic website? I feel like there should be a slot to put my quarter in.

* Don’t know if you saw the review of August Kleinzahler’s latest book of poetry in the Sunday NYT. I’m not a Kleinzahler fan yet — I really haven’t read him — but I’ve been struck by the fact that more people reach my site searching for him than any other poet I’ve mentioned. So I guess I really ought to check him out.

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The current issue of MOSAIC: Midwest Outreach for Swiss Art, Innovation and Culture, highlights Hugo Loetscher, the Swiss novelist and critic who will be reading at the Goethe-Institut next week.

In the same issue, I learned that francophone Swiss novelist Claude Darbellay will read from his works and lecture on “Literature as Experience” at Alliance Francaise on March 18. Darballay’s appearance is part of a festival entitled “Chicago Celebrates Francophonie in America.” I found a brief bio of Darbellay here, from a conference he spoke at in 2001. Unlike the Loetscher event, which is bilingual, this event is entirely in French. More details on the event are in the current AF newsletter.

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Two passages from Muriel Spark’s autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, both exhibiting the plain perfection of her style. I picked it up lately after reading Robinson, her second novel which was reissued last year by New Directions. She’s also got a new novel coming out, The Finishing School, nicely excerpted in The Guardian last week.

I used to keep a notebook which I called my “Despatch Book.” This is still among my papers. On the right side of the page I wrote the name of the journal to which I submitted my work as I wrote it. On the left I wrote against it, when the fate of the submitted piece was known, either the words “accepted” or “returned” — more often than not the latter. I see on one page I sent a poem called “The Messengers” to the Times Literary Supplement on 28 October (returned); and on the same day a poem “The Nativity” to Time and Tide (returned). On 29 October I sent a poem “Hymn to Apollo” to the Listener (returned). On 1 November I sent a parody verse-play The Cocktail’s Not for Drinking to Adelphi (returned), and on 1 November a poem “The Conversation of the Angels” (returned). On 5 November I recorded “The Observer Short Story Comp., The Seraph, the Zambesi, and the Fanfarlo.” This time my comment on the left hand side of the page is “Got it.”

________________________________________

Sixty years ago is a short time in history. As recently as that I made at least one pot of tea for the family every day. It was delicious tea. Every schoolgirl, every schoolboy, knew how to make that exquisite pot of tea.

You boiled the kettle, and just before it came to a boil, you half-filled the teapot to warm it. When the kettle came to that boil, you kept it simmering while you threw out the water in the teapot and then put in a level spoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot. Up to four spoonfuls of tea from that sweetly odorous tea-caddy would make the perfect pot. The caddy spoon was a special shape, like a small silver shovel. You never took the kettle to the teapot; always the pot to the kettle, where you filled it, but never to the brim.

You let it stand, to “draw,” for three minutes.

The tea had to be drunk out of china, as thin at the rim as you could afford. Otherwise you lost the taste of the tea.

You put in milk sufficient to cloud the clear liquid, and sugar if you had a sweet tooth. Sugar or not was the only personal choice allowed.

Everyone who came to the house was offered a cup of tea, as in Dostoyevsky. What his method of making tea was I don’t know.

ADDITION 3/2: The Guardian posts a plot summary, and the Sunday Herald an interview with the author (via Maud).

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