#dwight garner

He was miffed with the poetry editor Howard Moss for cutting too many of his best lines...You sense the slate beneath the purling surface current in his comment to (Roger) Angell: “Your turning down a story doesn’t make it any worse, any more than your taking it makes it better; so the effort, to please and challenge myself, remains the same.” Young fiction writers, tack this sentence on a card above your laptops.

George Saunders’ latest novel Vigil is told primarily from the perspective of a ghost, Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit who has resisted elevation to up there in order to remain on Earth, where she guides her dying “charges” into the afterlife. Her latest (and perhaps last) charge is one K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon dying in the “slop room” of his least favorite house. Boone spent his career denying…

—Dwight Garner, “On the Centennial of Iris Murdoch’s Birth, Remembering a 20th-Century Giant”

Garner exaggerates Murdoch’s loss of literary standing: she’s in print from Penguin Classics, which might be a quick definition of “canonical.” My recent piece on her short, strange 1961 novel, A Severed Head, even begins by considering it as a fashionable cult book. On the one hand, I gave it a mixed review. On the other hand, I recommend it most highly to anyone who wants a literately scandalous, even offensive (still!), reading experience:

I find a similar imbalance in A Severed Head as in Lolita, another novel of the era about mythical forbidden love that also (and somewhat contradictorily) makes an ethical point about the importance of treating other people as ends rather than means. Murdoch, like Nabokov, seems to want it both ways—scandal and morality, myth and reality—but she produces only an intricately-composed, beautifully-written duck/rabbit illusion (it’s surreally immoral! it’s realistically moral!) rather than a work capacious enough to hold its contraries in sustaining tension.

One: Literary careers are not handed out — they’re earned, they’re seized. Acker’s work ethic was titanic. Work was her religion. She wrote eight hours a day, regardless of what had happened the night before and, given that Acker was impulsive, ferally attractive and sexually omnivorous, plenty tended to happen the night before… For Acker, the place was always here; the time was always now.

Family does intrude as Freud’s children, legitimate and illegitimate, begin to crawl from the woodwork. He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself “one of the great absentee fathers of the age.” Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money.

Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. “They make it all right for me to paint them,” he said. “My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Freud had a mean word for everyone. He put the knife in white and it came out red. A typical comment in this volume, about an aunt, is: “She was very nasty really, in a small sort of way. Her expertise was opening letters. Other people’s.” If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors.