The King Died and Then The Queen Died

In his book Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster writes:

"The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot... "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

To that I would add, "Everyone thought that the queen had died of grief until they discovered the puncture mark in her throat." That is a murder mystery, and it too is capable of high development.

—P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction

The Power of Twitter

Last week it looked like Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel Up in the Air, upon which the hit movie was based, would be watching the Academy Awards from his living room. Kirn, you see, hadn't been invited to the Oscars, despite the fact that screenwriter Jason Reitman was up for a Best Adapted Screenplay award. Kirn retaliated against Paramount Pictures, who should have issued the invitation, on Twitter:

In a message Kirn posted on Wednesday (17Feb10), Kirn wrote, “Caution to writers: Don’t expect that because you write a novel that becomes an Oscar-nominated film that you’ll be invited to the Oscars. Novelists are like oil in H’wood (Hollywood): they drill us, pipeline us, pump us and then burn us.”

But movie bosses have moved quickly to settle the issue, giving Kirn a prime seat next to the film’s star, [George] Clooney.

Kirn confirmed his invitation via Twitter.com on Friday (19Feb10), writing: “Thanks to Paramount Pictures for coming through with Oscar tickets and proving true to its word, which I shouldn’t have doubted.”

Whoever said that all publicity is good publicity was wrong—at least in the era of Twitter.

The Murder of René Descartes

Someone please turn this into a mystery novel:

For more than three and a half centuries, the death of René Descartes one winter's day in Stockholm has been attributed to the ravages of pneumonia on a body unused to the Scandinavian chill. But in a book released after years spent combing the archives of Paris and the Swedish capital, one Cartesian expert has a more sinister theory about how the French philosopher came to his end.

According to Theodor Ebert, an academic at the University of Erlangen, Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.

Historical fiction isn't my forte, or I'd be on it in a second.

Faulkner's Inspiration

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-110952.Artistic inspiration is overrated as a subject of study, if you ask me. (And I say that as a Yale English major.) I understand the eager experience of reading a book and wondering where the ideas and characters came from, even sometimes rushing to an author's biography in search of clues. It's natural to assume that a story had to have been modeled closely on some real-life incident—how else could it have been so detailed and deeply felt?—when in reality the business of a novelist is to make shit up. Of course, writers mine their own lives for material all the time. But usually there's no smoking gun to connect an author directly with the object of his or her inspiration.

 

Well, according to the New York Times, someone just found a smoldering pistol tucked under William Faulkner's metaphorical bed.

  

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel Go Down, Moses comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered....

     The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood....

     Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in Go Down, Moses. Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in The Sound and The Fury (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in Absalom.

Faulkner evidently spent hours poring over this diary taking copious notes, and it's clear that it fired his imagination in untold ways. I'll confess to being intrigued to learn of its existence, and I bet scholars are salivating at the thought of reinterpreting Faulkner's entire opus in light of this discovery.

But knowing Faulkner got the names Candis and Ben from some dusty ledger doesn't change the memories I have of being blown out of my chair by the sheer brilliance of The Sound and The Fury. Nor should it, in my opinion. Faulkner's genius isn't that he recognized great source material when he saw it; it's that his singular imagination transformed a dead man's diary into universal statements on the human condition.

Manly Books

One Web site that I really get a kick out of is The Art of Manliness which bears the slogan "Reviving the Lost Art of Manliness." The site combines Teddy Roosevelt-style injunctions on how to live a virtuous life (e.g. take cold showers, split firewood for exercise, emulate Chuck Yeager) with sometimes silly, sometimes useful advice (e.g. how to shave with a safety razor, how to tie a half Windsor knot, how to make your own bay rum aftershave). Having just watched a Super Bowl in which half the television ads seemed largely devoted to contemporary emasculation, I would describe The Art of Manliness as a beacon designed to lead men out of the spreading scourge of twenty-first century wimpdom.

Some time ago, the Web site released its life of 100 Must Read Books: The Man's Essential Library. Many of the choices are appropriately hirsute (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Call of the Wild), while you'd be hard pressed to locate a single chest hair on some of the others (Catcher in the Rye? The Portrait of Dorian Gray?). We're talking manliness here, not literary merit.

I won't make any claims for The Poacher's Son being an essential book, but I think it deserves consideration for future lists of manly fiction. How much more testosterone can you pack into a book title?