The Great American Novel

 

Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Frank Norris says the great American novel is not extinct, like the dodo, but mythical, like the hippogriff.

      The great long continuous book of Scrib’s life, JOURNAL OF A SMALL-TOWN CRANK, now stood at 379 volumes, 380 in progress.  Each book was related to the one before it and the one after it.  The last book of the series would circle back to the first one, like a snake, swallowing its tail.  Familiar Buzzard Cult motif.

      Scrib could conceivably complete it before he sold a book to New York or Hollywood.  Then it would be unpublished, or underpublished.

      It annoyed John Bennett when he called himself unpublished, so he called himself underpublished.

      Harvey Griffin called Scrib the greatest living unpublished, or underpublished American writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished or underpublished American writer ever.

      He was certainly a good American writer, worthy of publication, but good wasn’t worthy, to the blockbuster mentality.  You had to write a bestseller.

      Part of being a professional criminal in the Richard Stark novels was being shot, losing scores, being betrayed, and doing time in prison.  Those were just part of the job.

      Part of being a writer was being rejected, being published, but the book not selling, having a poor track record.  If you had a poor track record it was the kiss of death.

      Apropos of the Melanesian gambit, making cat’s cradles out of cobwebs, George Eliot writes, “For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web:  promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.”

      It could happen.

      Theoretically.

      A Confederacy of Dunces wasn’t published until 11 years after John Kennedy Toole committed suicide.

      Barbara Pym had an even worse experience.

 

 

Two years after her modest success as a writer, in 1963, Barbara submitted An Unsuitable Attachment to Jonathan Cape, her publisher; to her dismay, it was rejected as being out of step with the times.  This was, of course, a severe blow.  She tried sending An Unsuitable Attachment to other publishers, only to have it rejected.  She revised it, but still the rejection letters came.  In all, twenty publishers refused to publish her latest novel (http://www.barbara-pym.org/bio.html).

 

 

      Her fortunes did turn around.

 

 

In the January 21, 1977 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Barbara Pym was twice named (by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil) as "the most underrated novelist of the century."  With astonishing speed, she emerged from "the wilderness" after sixteen years of obscurity, to almost instant fame and recognition.  Macmillan accepted Quartet in Autumn for publication in 1977 and it was short-listed for the Booker Prize.  In 1978, Macmillan published The Sweet Dove Died; both new novels drew critical acclaim in the United Kingdom and Macmillan hastened to reprint all the novels.  American audiences were quickly introduced to Barbara by E. P. Dutton which, in 1978, began publishing all of her novels.  Furthermore, the books were translated into many foreign languages and Pym enjoyed international acclaim (ibid).

 

 

      Sixteen years in the wilderness had sapped her spirit, though.  Two years after her rediscovery she died.

      The book trade killed her.

      Though you trade in messages from heaven, the curse of trade will dog you to the grave.

      At least, it had dogged Scrib for 38 years.

      Would he make 40 years?

      That was the drama of it, the drama of it.  As the trapeze artist said to his deaf-mute catch-man.

      Catch me by the balls of my feet, the balls of my feet.

 

 

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