The Mind Reposes, Vidal Disposes
Your man Jones greatly enjoyed the documentary on Eugene O’Neill that aired on PBS last night, hagiographic though it was. I could have done without Pacino, for sure. But wasn’t Plummer fantastic?
Jonathan Kalb, writing on the documentary in the New York Times yesterday, offered this opinion on O’Neill’s status:
The big question for many critics and writers is the extent to which O’Neill, the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist, ever really succeeded in manipulating his soap opera into great literature.
First Dreiser isn’t literature, now O’Neill isn’t. Leaving aside the question of what American playwright could possibly be “in” if O’Neill is “out,” this is the kind of thing that makes me fear for the future.
In such circumstances, the mind longs to repose in what Johnson called “the stability of truth.” This time, truth comes from the unlikely source of Gore Vidal:
Literature is, primarily, a chain of connections from the past to the present. It is not reinvented every morning, as some bad writers like to believe.
March 29th, 2006 04:45
Vidal is wrong. Literature is both “a chain of connections from the past to the present” and something that is “reinvented every morning,”
March 29th, 2006 04:55
I subscribe to the notion that literature is not only reinvented, but that those who champion it are flexible to remember its forefathers. Which is to say that Jonathan Kalb is a philistine and a fool.
March 29th, 2006 10:54
No, Dan, not reinvented. That implies wholesale change. But I’d accept that it changes every morning. Even every minute. But always less than it seems to be changing.
Strong words, Mr. Champion. I think that Kalb is simply sharing his assessment of O’Neill’s current value in the literary stock market, a fairly standard feature of arts pieces in the NYT. It’s just that, as with the real stock market, snapshots are less useful than historical comparisons.
March 30th, 2006 21:55
Who cares what bad writers think? Some writers have stood the test of time. O’Neil is one of them. But that doesn’t make Dreiser a bad writer, either. Literature is literature is literature…Enjoy!