Southern Bookman

Farewell, Paul Fussell

After reading Paul Fussell's obituary in The New York Times, I found on a dusty bookshelf at home Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell's study of the English literature that emerged from World War I began my abiding interest in the global bloodbath from 1914 to 1918 that wrecked European civilization and, as Fussell registered, brought forth a new ironic consciousness.

Beginning with Fussell's book, I've deeply studied what was called the "war to end all wars." One of my favorite books is an anthology of poetry and fiction from all countries embroiled in the war; the disillusion and ironic style Fussell analyzes in English writing was universal. The combination of the writers' high culture and the squalor of the trenches has always given me a deep tragic sense.

His examination of disillusion of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves (I'd previously read "Goodbye to All That") arrived during the crashing wave of Vietnam-era books, articles and movies. The anti-war and anti-establishment anger had been numbed by the advent of disco -- preceding Fussell's death were those of Robin Gibb and Donna Summer -- and Fussell's book achieved surprising popularity. The World War I era he evoked mirrored the contemporary post Watergate, post-Vietnam epoch. Fussell's book did for the great war's literature what Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore" did for the writings from the American Civil War.

I read other books by Fussell, his biography of Samuel Johnson, his study of the meter and form of English poetry, and his harrowing memoir of his World War II service as a young infantry soldier in Europe. He wrote with the classic elegance of English writers like Johnson, William Hazlitt and Walter Pater while maintaining a modern accessibility. In later life, he blasted U.S. culture with devastating, if heavy-handed, accuracy, an American version of British curmudgeons like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. A telling sign of the triumph of mass popular tastes over the classic values Fussell championed was that Summer's obituary, unlike Fussell's, made the Times front page.

If much of Fussell's rants at the debased mass culture will likely fade, his "Great War and Modern Memory" will be one of the books read for generations.

John Sutherland Uncovers History of English Novel

John Sutherland's "Lives of the Novelists" is entertaining and educational. Sutherland displays knowledge of American and English novelists famed and obscure from the 17th century through today. So far, I've made it to the end of the 19th century, with more than 1,000 pages to go. The book's witty capsule bios find value in the little-known writers and deflate the reputations of some of the better known ones, such as Dickens. Overall, the portraits offer an in-depth history of English literature and publishing.

One of Sutherland's strengths, a chatty, informal style, turns into a weakness. The writing is marred by all too frequent dangling phrases, some unintentionally and painfully comic. A learned professor such as Sutherland should not be so susceptible to such sloppy writing. Such constructions, alas, are increasingly common in books, magazines and newspapers.

Despite the tangled sentences, Sutherland is an amusing and learned guide. Apparently, he's read deeply in the novelists he covers, an amazing feat. Reading "Lives of the Poets" is like munching snacks, but the nutritional value is more like sliced carrots than potato chips.

Robert Caro, dinosaur rock star

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume of Caro's massive Lyndon Johnson biography, is receiving the kind of attention that books usually don't receive any more. The 78-year-old Caro, who has been working for decades on the biography, has been profiled in the New York Times magazine and Esquire, and the book has been reviewed universally, including Bill Clinton's rave on the front page of the Times Book Review.

Ironically in this era when movies for adolescents generally receive this burst of attention, articles on Caro emphasize his old-fashioned techniques. He works in an office in New York City, writing first in longhand, then on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. Shunning the computer and the Internet, he keeps cross-referenced paper files, kept in metal cabinets, in the once familiar manila folders. He's also drawn attention for his obsessive accumulation of details and the long delays in publication of each volume that has appeared so far. Times columnist Joe Nocera recently ridiculed Caro for this need to account for every minuscule piece of Johnson's life. He also disdained Caro's continued delays in finishing the project. At 78, Caro  has not yet examined the bulk of Johnson's presidency.

While Nocera's hit job smacked of an envious middleweight swinging wildly at a heavyweight, Nocera scored some hits. Caro's compulsive acculumulation of facts, ancient techniques and relentless editing and rewriting can seem pathological. Yet, in reading Nocera's piece, I wanted to defend Caro as one of the last, if not the final, upholders of an ancient tradition of scholarship and writing.

I'd recently read Natalie Dykstra's fine biography of Clover Adams, the tragic wife of pioneering American historian Henry Adams. Dykstra shows Henry Adams as very similar to Caro in his constant uncovering of details and stretching projects into mulitiple volumes. I wanted to tell Nocera that Caro deserves honor and acclaim for searching for the truth no matter what it takes.

Still, Adams finished his massive history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison Administrations much faster than Caro has done with his work. And, the descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams later published his "Education of Henry Adams" and "Mount St. Michel and Chartres."

As as reader, I bailed out of the Johnson project after Caro's first two volumes. His look at Johnson's years as the master of the U.S. Senate bogged down in legislative minutia. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the "Passage of Power," Caro's  account of the Kennedy assassination, which captivated me. I'll probably make an effort to read the entire book, which begins with Johnson's effort to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, examines his lost years as Kennedy's vice president and ends with Johnson's leadership in passing landmark civil rights legislation.  The look at Kennedy's presidency from Johnson's viewpoint promises to give a fresh account of "Camelot."

By the way, the title "The Passage of Power," strikes me as odd. This has a passive tone, as if the power passed to Johnson in some magical, mysterious way. It almost sounds as if it were a normal passage of power, as happens when an incumbent ends his two terms, or loses an election. The title's bland construction denies the historical reality that Johnson gained power because of the assassination.

Edith Pearlman, master of the short story

Edith Pearlman, a Brookline, Mass. writer whom I recently discovered, writes exquisite short stories that deserve broad acclaim.

Exceeding my expectations, Pearlman's collection "How to Fall" stunned me with its depth of characterization and plot, narrative brilliance and language. As each story presented new riches, I had that rare realization of discovery, that I was encountering a short story master.

In a recent interview, Pearlman said that she's happy with the short story form and feels that many novels would be better if shorter. Her stories, though, possess the range of great novels.

A  number of her stories in "How to Fall" share a theme, giving them the unity of a novel. Several of them take place in the fictional Boston suburb of Goldophin, a liberal enclave of community activists, food lovers, recyclers and good-cause contributors. The stories create a vivid and believable fictional place, as memorable as Faulkner's Mississippi, Joyce's Dublin, Roth's Newark and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

 The book opens with the the collection's title piece, which brilliantly evokes the era of early TV comedies. Later comes another set of stories located in Israel, which again give a breathtaking sense of place and character.

 Just when I thought Pearlman couldn't reach any higher, she did do with an interlocking series of stories set at the end of World War II, first in London and then in Poland. The stories are about those who help Jewish refugees from war-ravaged Europe build new lives.  Her picture of wartime London, then the camp for Jewish "displaced persons." is unforgettable, heart-piercing and inspiring. The main character in the stories, a woman who grows personally and professionally and becomes director of the camp, is one of the most memorable in American fiction.

The Pulitzer Prize committee failed to choose a fiction winner this year. Pearlman's most recent collection, "Binocular Vision," a selected-stories collection, won the National Book Award. The Pulitzer commissars were grossly negligent in overlooking Pearlman's work.

Memoirs of Punk Glory

I've been reading a cluster of memoirs from the 1960s-1970s on the punk/left wing/hippie era of New York City, from the lower east side over to the Village. All three I downloaded on my Nook, which seems all too easy too do, like another glass of wine when it's going down smooth. I doubt any of them will be on Rick Santorum's list, or that of any other GOP candidate for that matter, although Ron Paul might enjoy the liberatarian spirit of the times.

The first finished, Patti Smith's "Just Kids," about her love affair/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. As the 60s were burning out, and the '70s came like the horrible morning after, Patti came out with her "Horses," which I quite liked if I recall. The cover photo was by Mapplethorpe, which I'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, until I read the book. Despite her wild, cutting edge personna, Smih comes across in her book as a shy, nice, small-town girl, an innocent in the big city always finding a new man to cake care of her. The first part of the book talks about her meeting Mapplethorpe and her close early relationship with him, and it begins with narrative energy from the time-honored motif of two kids from the sticks in Manhattan. Then, as they hang on and establish a daily life of trying to become artists, the book's drive dissipates, with too much mundane detail about squalid apartments, bad jobs, folks met and drinks downed. At end end, the book regains its opening power, fnishing with a poingnant account of Mapplethorpe's death.

The lastest I'm reading is James Walcott's account of the same time, wrriten from his jounalist's perspective. Walcott is a more fluid writer than Smith, better able to give dramatic force to the details and anecdotes he recalls, although he often overreaches with his verbal effects. His hip asides are amusing when on-target, but are annoying when he goes amiss. He too hits a dead zone in the middle of the book,which I hope he spins out of soon.

The most disappointing one is Ed Sanders' memoirs about the Fugs and his Peace Eye Bookstore, As with Smioth, he piles on surfeit of details that read more like a private diary without putting them in a broader context for the reader. The book is still entertaining, but too many chapters pile up with unrefined facts about places played, folks met, songs written.

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

Andre Dubus III Finds Beauty in Wretched Childhood

Andre Dubus' III's "Townie" gives a devastating condemnation of the '60s and its breaking of social norms. Like so many other personal memoirs in recent years, "Townie" examines excruciating details of a bleak childhood. While not reaching the best of the genre, such as books by Mary Karr and Joe Queenan, Dubus finds strange, poignant beauty in his story of violence, parental neglect, and the '60s "let it all hang out" philosophy.

I checked out the book at the library, and its pages are stained with substances whose origins I was reluctant to think about too closely. The dark stains are a good match for the book, which tells how Dubus' father, the noted writer Andre Dubus II, left his family for younger women and how Dubus II's mother was unable to cope with the resulting poverty and her responsbilities as a mother.

Dubus II was a saintly, heroic figure to me when I read his essays about how he coped with devastating injuries received an a horrible accident on a Boston interstate, but "Townie" paints him as an irresponsible father, philanderer, alcoholic and bloodthirsty lover of violence. Like William Styron, whose daughter, Alexandra blasted her father in a recent memoir, Dubus II is pilloried by a child who also became a writer. 

"Townie" gives repeated scenes of bar fighting, apparently the only growth industry in the economically deprived Massachusetts town where he grew up. Dubus III tells how he starts out as a frequent victim of bullies, then builds himself up through weightlifting and boxing lessons to turn into a brutal fighting predator himself. As with other memoirs, the sense of place is strong, with the economically ruined town and the polluted Merrimack River somehow given a perverse pastoral uniqueness.

The book ends with reconciliation, as Dubus finds peace as a writer and cares for his father, whose legs were crushed by a car that ran over him when he'd stopped to give aid to a couple whose vehicle had broken down on the interstate. 

Dubus IIi follows the well-worn personal memoir template, but does it with vivid language. He would have benefited from better editing; he shows an irritating fondness for run-on sentences, and his narrative control slackens at times. While not quite a classic of the genre, "Townie" is a worthy look at how family love and endurance overcomes human weakness.

Faulkner's "The Hamlet" stands among his master works

August, a month so associated with William Faulkner, meanders along with waves of heat broken by rain and stormy winds. I'll mark this late summer, when global warming grows deeper, with the reading of Faulkner's "The Hamlet."

I'd known of Faulkner's Snopes family saga and read a good part of it, such as the fine short story "Barn Burning," which a lovely Louisiana lady explained to me at the Faulkner conference at Ole Miss. But I'd never read the novel trilogy, "The Hamlet," "The Town" and "The Mansion." Someplace I'd read a quote by  Gabriel García Márquez that "The Hamlet" is among the greatest Latin American novels, and that lit my desire to read the book, the first part of the trilogy.

As with other Faulkner books I've discovered over the years after my college reading of the standard "great novels" of "The Sound and the Fury," "Light in August" and "As I Lay Dying," I was thankful to have read it. My life would have been significantly lessened without this great book. "The Hamlet" joins "Absalom, Absalom" and "The Wild Palms" as Faulkner books I've read for the first time relatively late in life. 

"The Hamlet," published in 1940, is one of Faulkner's great works. In it, Faulkner displays a wonderful rough-edged humor, as rich and knowledgeable about frontier life as Clemens. The book can stand with "Huckleberry Finn" as a comic masterpiece. As with Clemens, "The Hamlet" shows the mastery of a variety of different dialects. It also shows an astonishing range of literary forms in one book: the tall tale, the joke, magical realism, the Victorian novel, 20th centry "stream of consciousness," the Western, the mystery, the potboiler, the Southern gothic.

After savoring the novel', I was taken even higher by the writing in the last section, "The Peasants." The novel details the life of "Frenchmen's Bend," the rough settlement near Faulkner's central location of Jefferson. The novel often shows the farmers and workers of Frenchmen's Bend sitting and talking on the front porch of the country store, the center of Flem Snopes' rise to power and the steady accumulation of other members of the clan. The dialogue in "The Peasants" shows a perfect ear for Southern speech and the rural rhythms of life in Mississippi after the Civil War. The funny, amaazing stories that unfold show an ineffable narrative gift. 

The qualities of the book continue. The variety of their characters, and the sure touch of their names, matches Dickens. In fact, although Faulkner is often celebrated, or derided, for his modernist narrative disjunctions of chronological time and point of view, I found the book at its best when he uses the standard narrative techniques of 19th century masters like Dostoyevsky and. Turgenev.

Among the many wonderful characters in the book, a couple stand out. V.K. Ratliff, the "sewing machine agent," is the book's moral center. He is prone to wheeling and dealing and the pursuit of money, at times with nearly shady acts, yet he also shows compassion toward others, humor and the responsibility of preserving the tribal heritage of the place. Ratliff, with his knowledge of every inch of the territory from his travels on his buckboard selling sewing machines, and his desire to be the chief storyteller, has a consciousness similar to Faulkner's. One weakness of the book is that at the end, he is deceived by Flem Snopes in the funny, amazing denoument of the novel. Although Faulkner tries to address this problem, I am not convinced that Ratliff would fall for Snopes' strategem; he is just too smart, too canny, too wise. This problem is not serious enough to ruin the book, but it is one of the few places where Faulkner missteps.

Another character whom received extra affection from Faulkner is the young boy with the amusing name "Wall Street Panic" Snopes. Again, the boy's wild energy, curiosity and ability to survive hair-raising adventures reminded me of Clemens' Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I had the feeling that Wall Snopes is Faulkner's image of himself as a boy, running around Oxford Mississippi and environs.

Now, on to the other parts of the Snopes trilogy, "The Town," published in 1957, and "The Mansion," 1959. The last two books were published late in Faulkner's life, and I fear they will show a lessening of powers. Even if I find "The Town" and "The Mansion" don't reach the heights of "The Hamlet," I trust they will stand above most books.

Faulkner's imagination was taken by the Snopses throughout his career; he first conceived of the stories in the 1920s. He loves all of the families and characters he created, but he has a special, rough affection for the Snopeses. I look forward to completing the journey.

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair.