Putnam editor “was trying to read [Timequake] as a novel, which it wasn’t. It was the autobiograp... more Putnam editor “was trying to read [Timequake] as a novel, which it wasn’t. It was the autobiography of a novel” (116). That was enough to convince both Vonnegut and Putnam’s. As a finger in his new publisher’s eye, Vonnegut dedicated Timequake to his former editor, Seymour Lawrence. (Vonnegut’s highly supportive two-decade long relationship with Seymour Lawrence and his Delacorte Press imprint at Dell is a subject worthy of its own book-length study.) Vonnegut wrote because he wanted to and at first because he needed to; the first two decades were a financial struggle. But even long after he had become financially secure, the former World War II POW continued to write because Vonnegut, as Klinkowitz notes, “felt that his country still needed him” (123). It did; we still do. Klinkowitz adds that “Nobly civic in intent,” Vonnegut spent his life as a writer “tr[ying] to give voice to the sentiments behind [his] memories of an ideal America” (1). At General Electric, his older brother Bernard worked on a cloud seeding project. Vonnegut worked on a similar project throughout his career: poisoning young people’s minds with humanity. The fact that the last work published while Vonnegut was still alive, A Man without a Country (2005), a slim book by a small press, made the New York Times bestsellers list and attracted a new generation of readers proves, Klinkowitz believes, that Vonnegut’s “influence is still with us and that is what Kurt Vonnegut’s America is all about” (x). I think we need to distinguish between Vonnegut’s influence, which is indisputable but lamentably long past, and his continuing relevance. Vonnegut’s humanism and sense of social justice are arguably even more relevant and therefore needed today, but to believe that Vonnegut is still influential is to engage in wishful thinking, not unlike wishing that that earlier “Lincoln of our literature,” Mark Twain, had been right about “the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” Would it were so. After publishing what he said would be his last novel, Timequake (1997), Vonnegut thought about writing another, which survives only as a title: “If God Were Alive Today.” It is a good Kilgore Trout title, one that echoes If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), by Twain’s contemporary, William T. Stead. Vonnegut became a man without a country who wondered what God would think were he alive today because he had spent more than half a century doing pretty much what Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim did both as an optometrist and more especially when talking about Tralfamadore: prescribing corrective lenses to a nation that refused to the see the error of its ways and that had increasingly become over the course of what Henry Luce jingoistically dubbed “the American Century” a danger to the rest of the world and an embarrassment to itself and the principles it so noisily proclaims. If this generously written book with its disarmingly avuncular Vonnegut-like tone makes its readers want to read or re-read Vonnegut, and to make him just as influential as he is relevant, then Klinkowitz deserves our thanks, yet again.
In this article, we reprint McCarthy’s interviews from newspapers of East Tennessee and Lexington... more In this article, we reprint McCarthy’s interviews from newspapers of East Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky, including five newly discovered ones, all granted between 1968 and 1980, when McCarthy was still a relatively unknown author. In contrast with his usual reticence, these pieces provide candid glimpses of McCarthy’s ideas about his writing. Together, they suggest that McCarthy was often willing to be interviewed when it would please his friends and neighbors.
In the absence of the first draft(s) of Child of God, this article reconstructs McCarthy's ea... more In the absence of the first draft(s) of Child of God, this article reconstructs McCarthy's earliest conception for the novel via study of the Ur-Child of God scenes in Outer Dark's “Early Draft [B]” and unused early draft material that remains in the “Middle Draft” of Child of God. It shows that narrative strands central to McCarthy's initial conception for Ballard's novel—the auction and eviction, the sheriff, and the oral tale motif—grew out of material deleted from Outer Dark. It explores the function of the deleted scenes in Outer Dark and examines how McCarthy reshaped these and other deleted materials for Child of God.
In a letter to Robert Coles, McCarthy paraphrases Ortega y Gasset's “Notes on the Novel,” whi... more In a letter to Robert Coles, McCarthy paraphrases Ortega y Gasset's “Notes on the Novel,” which appears together with “On Point of View in the Arts” in The Dehumanization of Art. The latter essay proves to be McCarthy's primary source for the concept of optical democracy in Blood Meridian. McCarthy's reflection of Ortega's optical democracy challenges the idea that McCarthy sees no moral order in the world. His passage does not endorse the equivalency of all living and inanimate things but warns that the dazzling desert landscape of Blood Meridian is the terrain of moral confusion.
After Cormac McCarthy submitted his final draft of Suttree to Random House in 1977, editor Albert... more After Cormac McCarthy submitted his final draft of Suttree to Random House in 1977, editor Albert Erskine asked him to condense the book, eliminate dull dialogue, and clarify his view of his protagonist. Over a period of eight or nine months, McCarthy revised, deleting five episodes, four of which reflect his engagement with the narrative complexities and troubling cruelties of the Sut Lovingood yarns. Drawing on typescripts and correspondence, this article summarizes and analyzes the unpublished episodes, evaluates what each had contributed to the novel and what was gained and lost when McCarthy deleted them. His revision process did little to make his attitudes toward Suttree more explicit, but it reduced the distasteful realism of the novel, sacrificed a few plot connections, abandoned interesting (if not always successful) material relating to oral storytelling and its transformation into literary storytelling, and reduced the indications that Suttree is a writer in the making.
Putnam editor “was trying to read [Timequake] as a novel, which it wasn’t. It was the autobiograp... more Putnam editor “was trying to read [Timequake] as a novel, which it wasn’t. It was the autobiography of a novel” (116). That was enough to convince both Vonnegut and Putnam’s. As a finger in his new publisher’s eye, Vonnegut dedicated Timequake to his former editor, Seymour Lawrence. (Vonnegut’s highly supportive two-decade long relationship with Seymour Lawrence and his Delacorte Press imprint at Dell is a subject worthy of its own book-length study.) Vonnegut wrote because he wanted to and at first because he needed to; the first two decades were a financial struggle. But even long after he had become financially secure, the former World War II POW continued to write because Vonnegut, as Klinkowitz notes, “felt that his country still needed him” (123). It did; we still do. Klinkowitz adds that “Nobly civic in intent,” Vonnegut spent his life as a writer “tr[ying] to give voice to the sentiments behind [his] memories of an ideal America” (1). At General Electric, his older brother Bernard worked on a cloud seeding project. Vonnegut worked on a similar project throughout his career: poisoning young people’s minds with humanity. The fact that the last work published while Vonnegut was still alive, A Man without a Country (2005), a slim book by a small press, made the New York Times bestsellers list and attracted a new generation of readers proves, Klinkowitz believes, that Vonnegut’s “influence is still with us and that is what Kurt Vonnegut’s America is all about” (x). I think we need to distinguish between Vonnegut’s influence, which is indisputable but lamentably long past, and his continuing relevance. Vonnegut’s humanism and sense of social justice are arguably even more relevant and therefore needed today, but to believe that Vonnegut is still influential is to engage in wishful thinking, not unlike wishing that that earlier “Lincoln of our literature,” Mark Twain, had been right about “the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” Would it were so. After publishing what he said would be his last novel, Timequake (1997), Vonnegut thought about writing another, which survives only as a title: “If God Were Alive Today.” It is a good Kilgore Trout title, one that echoes If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), by Twain’s contemporary, William T. Stead. Vonnegut became a man without a country who wondered what God would think were he alive today because he had spent more than half a century doing pretty much what Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim did both as an optometrist and more especially when talking about Tralfamadore: prescribing corrective lenses to a nation that refused to the see the error of its ways and that had increasingly become over the course of what Henry Luce jingoistically dubbed “the American Century” a danger to the rest of the world and an embarrassment to itself and the principles it so noisily proclaims. If this generously written book with its disarmingly avuncular Vonnegut-like tone makes its readers want to read or re-read Vonnegut, and to make him just as influential as he is relevant, then Klinkowitz deserves our thanks, yet again.
In this article, we reprint McCarthy’s interviews from newspapers of East Tennessee and Lexington... more In this article, we reprint McCarthy’s interviews from newspapers of East Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky, including five newly discovered ones, all granted between 1968 and 1980, when McCarthy was still a relatively unknown author. In contrast with his usual reticence, these pieces provide candid glimpses of McCarthy’s ideas about his writing. Together, they suggest that McCarthy was often willing to be interviewed when it would please his friends and neighbors.
In the absence of the first draft(s) of Child of God, this article reconstructs McCarthy's ea... more In the absence of the first draft(s) of Child of God, this article reconstructs McCarthy's earliest conception for the novel via study of the Ur-Child of God scenes in Outer Dark's “Early Draft [B]” and unused early draft material that remains in the “Middle Draft” of Child of God. It shows that narrative strands central to McCarthy's initial conception for Ballard's novel—the auction and eviction, the sheriff, and the oral tale motif—grew out of material deleted from Outer Dark. It explores the function of the deleted scenes in Outer Dark and examines how McCarthy reshaped these and other deleted materials for Child of God.
In a letter to Robert Coles, McCarthy paraphrases Ortega y Gasset's “Notes on the Novel,” whi... more In a letter to Robert Coles, McCarthy paraphrases Ortega y Gasset's “Notes on the Novel,” which appears together with “On Point of View in the Arts” in The Dehumanization of Art. The latter essay proves to be McCarthy's primary source for the concept of optical democracy in Blood Meridian. McCarthy's reflection of Ortega's optical democracy challenges the idea that McCarthy sees no moral order in the world. His passage does not endorse the equivalency of all living and inanimate things but warns that the dazzling desert landscape of Blood Meridian is the terrain of moral confusion.
After Cormac McCarthy submitted his final draft of Suttree to Random House in 1977, editor Albert... more After Cormac McCarthy submitted his final draft of Suttree to Random House in 1977, editor Albert Erskine asked him to condense the book, eliminate dull dialogue, and clarify his view of his protagonist. Over a period of eight or nine months, McCarthy revised, deleting five episodes, four of which reflect his engagement with the narrative complexities and troubling cruelties of the Sut Lovingood yarns. Drawing on typescripts and correspondence, this article summarizes and analyzes the unpublished episodes, evaluates what each had contributed to the novel and what was gained and lost when McCarthy deleted them. His revision process did little to make his attitudes toward Suttree more explicit, but it reduced the distasteful realism of the novel, sacrificed a few plot connections, abandoned interesting (if not always successful) material relating to oral storytelling and its transformation into literary storytelling, and reduced the indications that Suttree is a writer in the making.
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