Writing Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories to be republished with the sex, drugs and profanities put back in

Via The Independent: F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories to be republished with the sex, drugs and profanities put back in. Excerpt:

The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fourth collection of stories are to be re-published with all of the sex, nudity, drug-taking and profanity originally censored by editors of The Saturday Evening Post reinstated. 

The author's short stories were written for The Post during the late 1920s and early 1930s and while he was heavily in debt despite his popularity. 

The Post, fearing it may upset its middle class readership, removed references to sexual acts, innuendos and nudity, including a scene involving a woman running a bath naked, amending it instead to a fully clothed woman running the water. 

Scholar James West has since restored the stories using final drafts to present them in their original form for the latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald.

“Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at The Post,” Mr West told The Guardian.

“More generally, in all of the stories, the characters use the profanity, mild blasphemies, and slang words that Fitzgerald wanted them to use. They [the characters] speak like real people,” he added.

The health of Gabriel García Márquez is "very fragile": family

Credit: The Guardian

Via La Crónica de Hoy in Mexico City: La salud de García Márquez es "muy frágil", informan familiares.[The health of García Márquez is "very fragile," family members say] Excerpt, with my translation:

La esposa del octogenario escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, Mercedes Barcha, y sus hijos Rodrigo y Gonzalo emitieron hoy un comunicado en el que reconocieron que la condición del Nobel de Literatura 1982 es estable pero "muy frágil" y que "existen riesgos de complicaciones" debido a su edad. 

The wife of the octogenarian Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Mercedes Barcha, and their sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo today issued a statement in which they said the condition of the 1982 Nobel Laureate is stable but "very fragile," and the "there are risks of complications" owing to his age.

Los familiares del autor de "Cien años de soledad" señalaron que el novelista "sigue y seguirá convaleciendo en su casa" en Ciudad de México después de una reciente hospitalización por un proceso de infección pulmonar y en las vías urinarias. 

The family of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude said the novelist "is convalescing and will remain in his house" in Mexico City after a recent hospitalization for infections in the lungs and urinary tract.

"Su condición es estable aunque se encuentra muy frágil y existen riesgos de complicaciones de acuerdo a su edad (87 años)", enfatizó el comunicado. 

"His condition is stable but he is very fragile and there are risks of complications related to his age (87)," the statement said.

Añadió que García Márquez "ha recibido muchísimas muestras de cariño de parte de los amigos y de los medios de comunicación". "La familia agradece estos gestos solidarios y pide que se respete su intimidad", puntualizó el comunicado.

It added that García Márquez "has received very many expressions of affection from friends and through the media. The family is grateful for these and asks that their privacy be respected."

All of Latin America, and much of the rest of the world, will be deeply saddened when Gabo goes. I will be among them. He has always been the Maestro, the writer who dumbfounded all other writers with his perception and storytelling genius. 

Three dystopic novels

The Tyee has published my article Three Dystopic Novels for Unpleasant Times. It's a review of Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood, On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee, and Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh. The introduction:

I used to think that science fiction by "serious" writers was a form of poverty tourism: some famous novelist would jet into our benighted third-world genre, take a guided tour of our slums, snap some photos and go home to make a fortune with a book full of stuff that we natives had already done, and done better. 

Reading Northrop Frye set me straight. He could trace the pedigree of science fiction all the way back to Menippus, a Cynic philosopher in the 3rd century B.C. Menippean satire. As Frye described it, it was directed at intellectuals; it was intended to puncture their pretensions, not to entertain the masses. In its modern forms, Frye argued, Menippean satire looks at the world in terms of a single overriding idea: H.G. Wells's invasion from Mars, for example, or Karel Capek's robots. 

The overriding idea of an ideal society has been around since St. Thomas More's Utopia, and plenty of modern science fiction writers have followed his example. More was satirizing European Christians by showing them a pagan society more orderly and humane than anything in Christendom. 

Later writers, in turn, satirized More by turning him on his head and portraying dystopias -- societies that are appalling perversions of what we say we value. The early Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, in his dystopian novel We, inspired both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Preventing the future 

Those writers, all intellectuals, were really portraying their own societies' utopian dreams. In fact, they blasted those dreams so thoroughly that straight utopias became almost unwritable (though Huxley gave it a try in his late novel Island). As Ray Bradbury famously said, the purpose of science fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.

Can You Guess The Classic Novel From Its First Sentence?

Via Buzzfeed: Can You Guess The Classic Novel From Its First Sentence. I scored 13/17, and Buzzfeed correctly guessed I'd majored in English (well, an English major has to be good for something).

Margaret Atwood on Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for literature

Just last month I was touring the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, so I know where Alice Munro will be in December when she steps across the cobblestones of Stockholm's Gamla Stan to accept her Nobel Prize. To explain the importance of this achievement, Margaret Atwood writes in The Guardian: Alice Munro's road to Nobel literature prize was not easy. Excerpt:

Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, thus becoming its 13th female recipient. It's a thrilling honour for a major writer: Munro has long been recognised in North America and the UK, but the Nobel will draw international attention, not only to women's writing and Canadian writing, but to the short story, Munro's chosen métier and one often overlooked. 

Whenever the Nobel is conferred, a deluge of media descends – like the pack of cards cascading on to that other Alice, she of Wonderland – not only on the winner, illuminated in the sudden glare of international publicity like a burglar trapped in headlights, but on every other writer who has known the chosen one. A quote, a reminiscence, an evaluation! Account for it! Why her? they clamour. 

Munro herself is unlikely to say much along these lines: Canadians are discouraged from bragging – see the Munro story, Who Do You Think You Are? – so will probably spend much of her time hiding in the figurative tool shed. 

We're all slightly furtive, we writers; especially we Canadian writers, and even more especially we Canadian female writers of an earlier generation. "Art is what you can get away with," said Canadian Marshall MacLuhan, and I invite the reader to count how many of the murderers in Munro's stories are ever caught. (Answer: none.) Munro understands the undercover heist that is fiction writing, as well as its pleasures and fears: how delicious to have done it, but what if you get found out?

Sometime in the 1970s I met Alice Munro at some literary event in Vancouver, when I was a young college teacher using her short stories in my CanLit course. She was a cheerful, friendly person, and I feel proud to have been in her presence long ago.

Elmore Leonard has died

Via The Globe and Mail, an Associated Press report: Crime fiction author Elmore Leonard dies. As I write this, CBC Radio News is eulogizing him. Excerpt:

Elmore Leonard, the beloved crime novelist whose acclaimed bestsellers and the movies made from them chronicled the violent deaths of many a thug and con man, has died. He was 87. 

Leonard, winner of an honorary National Book Award in 2012, died Tuesday morning at his home in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit, from complications of a stroke, according to his researcher, Gregg Sutter. He was surrounded by family when he died, Sutter said. 

His millions of fans, from bellhops to Saul Bellow, made all his books since Glitz (1985) bestsellers. When they flocked to watch John Travolta in the movie version of Get Shorty in 1995, its author became the darling of Hollywood’s hippest directors. And book critics and literary lions, prone to dismiss crime novels as mere entertainments, competed for adjectives to praise him. 

His more than 40 novels were populated by pathetic schemers, clever con men and casual killers. Each was characterized by moral ambivalence about crime, black humour and wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of Armand Degas in Killshot, the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, Jack Belmont’s lust for notoriety in The Hot Kid. 

“When something sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” Leonard often said; and critics adored the flawlessly unadorned, colloquial style. As author Ann Arensberg put it in a New York Times book review, “I didn’t know it was possible to be as good as Elmore Leonard.”

The story is of course all over the media, but I recommend checking with his official website, which already has the news of the death.

As I said in my 2008 appreciation of him, we will not see his like again.

Iain Banks: Tributes pour in for 'one of Scotland's literary greats'

Via The Guardian: Iain Banks: tributes pour in for 'one of Scotland's literary greats'. Excerpt:

Tributes have been paid to the author Iain Banks, 59, best known for his novels The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, who has died just two months after announcing he had terminal cancer. 

The Scottish writer had announced his illness with trademark dark humour on his website on 3 April, telling fans he was "officially Very Poorly" and had been diagnosed with late stage gall bladder cancer and was unlikely to live for more than a year. He had asked his partner, Adele Hartley, to do him the honour "of becoming my widow", he had added. 

In his last update, on 20 May, he had posted that he was considering chemotherapy to prolong his life if doctors felt it was appropriate. 

But his condition deteriorated rapidly on Wednesday. In an email to friends, his widow said that he had died peacefully and was in no pain. The couple had been hoping for a few more months together. 

His friend and fellow writer, Ken MacLeod, told BBC News: "He was still in good spirits and concentrating on his plans and projects and expecting to have another few months. But his situation took a turn for the worse." 

He added: "What Iain brought to his writing was himself. He brought a wonderful combination of the dark and the light side of life, and he explored them both without flinching. 

"He left us a very significant body of work both in mainstream literature and in science fiction. And he left a large gap in the Scottish literary scene as well as that of the wider English-speaking world." 

Neil Gaiman, also a close friend of Banks, tweeted: "Iain Banks is dead. I'm crying in an empty house. A good man and a friend for almost 30 years." 

Banks, an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, will have a very small, humanist funeral. He had selected a dozen people to attend the short ceremony. An informal memorial gathering will be held at a later date. 

Banks, who wrote science fiction under the name Iain M Banks, published The Wasp Factory, his first novel, in 1984. It was ranked as one of the best 100 books of the 20th century in a 1997 poll conducted by Waterstone's and Channel 4. In 2008, Banks was named one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 in a list compiled by the Times. In all he wrote more than two dozen novels.

Jack Vance dies aged 96: master of bold and bizarre science fiction

Via The Guardian, an obituary for another of the greats: Jack Vance dies aged 96: master of bold and bizarre science fiction. Excerpt:

Jack Vance, who has died aged 96, was a writer of science fiction and high epic fantasy whose work was oddly at variance with the journeyman genre in which it first appeared. His prose – detailed, exotic, resonant of feelings, sounds and fragrances – soared well above the requirements of the genre; he described alien landscapes with bizarre and inventive energy in language that was ambitious, wordy, sometimes lurid, always bold. 

One of his best-known titles, The Dying Earth, began as a collection of short stories in 1950 and eventually expanded to become a whole series of books set in a far-off future in which the sun is slowly going out, and technology and magic coexist. 

His output was vast: he published more than 60 books, some under pseudonyms, among them 11 mystery novels, three of them as Ellery Queen. In addition, he wrote some of the first, and perhaps best, examples of "planetary adventures". 

He, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs in the early years of the 20th century, and his contemporaries Leigh Brackett, Philip José Farmer and Edmond Hamilton, helped to create the idiom, and his novel Big Planet (which first appeared in a magazine in 1952, and was subsequently revised and expanded) is probably his best of this kind.

Over 60 years later, I still remember reading Big Planet in Startling Stories, a pulp SF magazine, and the name of its hero, Claude Glystra—who had the "pushbutton rasp of authority" in his voice when he needed it. When a writer can make that kind of impression on a young reader, that's the kind of quiet success few of us ever achieve.

Gatsby Revisited

The Tyee has published my article Gatsby Revisited. Excerpt:

The Great Gatsby seems insubstantial: a string of parties and social meetings in the summer of 1922, stitched together with train trips and car rides between New York City and the Long Island suburbs of East and West Egg. Most of the characters are in their late 20s or early 30s, the last generation born in the 19th century but very much at home in the 20th. It deals with some love affairs, and a little violence. The story is just 182 pages long. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was just 29 when he published it in 1925, and already the famous author of two earlier novels and dozens of stories and articles. Toward the end of his short life (he died of heart failure in 1940, at 44), he regretted that he had not followed Gatsby with a string of similar books. Instead he veered off into projects that took years (like Tender is the Night). Then, when they appeared in the 1930s, they seemed like warmed-over 1920s. Then he struggled to make money in Hollywood to support his insane wife in a sanitarium and to put their daughter through college. 

Actually, it's hard to imagine a novel that could have topped Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald made The Great Gatsby into a kind of MRI scan of 1920s America, exposing countless social tumours and lesions that remain unhealed almost a century later.

An update on David Stacton

The other day I posted a review of some of David Stacton's novels, now available again almost 50 years after his death. I then went to Amazon.com: stacton: Kindle Store, and bought four of his novels.

I'm now reading one of his earliest, A Fox Inside. I hadn't even known it existed. It was first published in 1955 in Britain; Stacton was 32 then, but already writing confidently in his own voice. And it's extraordinary.

A Fox Inside is a kind of noir novel about a death in a family of Very Old California Money, specifically on March 15, 1953, in Bolinas, north of San Francisco. Stacton's world seems very contemporary despite the lack of cell phones and websites. (Much of the action takes place on the Stanford campus and the San Jose area, long before they became Silicon Valley.)

Stacton moves his point of view from one character to another, and after starting his novel with the death, he moves gracefully through extended flashbacks to the early 1940s and before, showing how the characters got into their situation. His social perceptiveness foreshadows his historical novels; this thriller is itself now historical, a remarkable evocation of a lost era. His protagonist, Luke, is an outsider despised by the wealthy Barnes matriarch, yet drawn into trying to save her and her daughter from their own folly.

His later work was both praised and damned for its reliance on aphorisms; they certainly turn up here, but I can believe that Luke, the successful outsider, is still alienated enough to observe the world with Stacton's detached irony.

And while the historical novels are notably short on extended dialogue, Stacton here is a master of talk you can hear—better said, overhear. His main characters are very much people born in the 1920s or earlier, thinking and speaking in sentences without sounding artificial.

I haven't finished A Fox Inside, but Stacton clearly knows what he's doing and I'm not afraid of a disappointing ending. This is what Raymond Chandler could have done, if he'd ever grown up.