Life After Booze

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave. According to Donald Goodwin in his book “Alcohol and the Writer”: Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.

But what happens when a writer stops drinking? asks Tom Shone in Intelligent Life Magazine. Does the writing become pedestrian, lose its vigour? He looks at the careers of some of the greatest American authors - F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Hemingway. Raymond Carver stands out as the writer who eventually gave up the bottle after a long struggle and realised a new creative vitality :

For a year he wrote nothing (“I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing”), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best work—he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, “Cathedral”, illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection.

Carver's Legacy

Twenty years after his death, Raymond Carver's star is on the ascendant. His reputation as one of the best short fiction writers of all time (as well as poet, playwright and essayist) is still growing, and alongside it an interest in Carver the man, Kasia Boddy writes me in the Telegraph.

There's now an International Raymond Carver Society, and a journal online : Raymond Carver Review. His collected short fiction will be out in a single volume next year, two novelists have used him as a character in their own fiction ... and he even has a rose named after him!

Much of Carver's appeal lies in his very spare style, but James Campbell in the Guardian last December (and this was a story I should have blogged back then - sorry!) dropped rather a bombshell. Carver's originals manuscripts (which may be published) had been much more wordy, and the spare minimalism that turned the stories into classics of the genre, was due to the intervention of his editor, Gordon Lish!

But whatever the truth, Carver's stories are as near to perfect as is possible, and if you write short fiction yourself you could do much worse than let a bit of his influence rub off on you.

After all, Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami and AL Kennedy acknowledge the debt.

Kaavya and Carver: Cryptonesiacs?

One of the things I love most about having this blog is the way folks drop by and leave links to stuff that's much more interesting than the post that lead to the comments in the first place! Am I humbled or what?

That certainly happened the other day when I wrote about Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism and if you have the time, do go and pick up some of the leads.

Dear old Anon left an intriguing note about an interesting article in IHT which highlighted that the author actually worked with a book packager to come up with the storyline. I tracked down the article to the New York Times, and intriguing reading it makes too. Like Anon, I had never heard of a book packager before and my eyes are opened. Tom Tomorrow tackles the same subject on his blog (thanks so much Swifty, for this link) and smells a rat:

Obviously I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d be willing to bet some modest sum (my own advances falling rather short of the half million mark) that there’s more to this story than is being reported so far.

Also worth checking out is the story from the archives of salon.com that Sufian mentioned: why is Raymond Carver's most famous short-story Cathedral so similar to a D.H. Lawrence: The Blind Man? Of course, there can be no question of a great writer like Carver getting up to Kaavya-like shenanigans ... can there?

Meanwhile, copies of Kaayva's book are stacked high in Times in Bangsar Shopping complex. Since the book is apparently being recalled, you might want to whiz over there and bag one, because it's bound to have rarity value later on. (One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I didn't buy the locally produced Gulf War board game back in 1991. Just think how much that would be worth now!)

Just in case you aren't sure what a cryptonesiac is, check it out here.

The Goddess of the Literary Bordello

I blogged before about how the short story was fast becoming an endangered species in Britain.

Now there's news of a new £15,000 National Short Story Prize funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) and supported by BBC Radio 4 and Prospect magazine.

It's hoped that the prize will put the short story

"... back at the heart of the modern literary landscape."

Britain's literary landscape that is.

Elsewhere, the short story is alive and well.

Now isn't this just such a lovely bibliobibulous soundbite from Alex Linklater, deputy editor of Prospect?:

The novel is a capacious old whore: everyone has a go at her, but she rarely emits so much as a groan for their efforts ... The short story, on the other hand, is a nimble goddess: she selects her suitors fastidiously and sings like a dove when they succeed. The British literary bordello is heaving with flabby novels; it's time to give back some love to the story.

You can read Linklater's article here.

And the article by Raymond Carver that Linklater refers to can also be found here. If you have any interest in writing short fiction this is compulsory reading - from arguably the greatest master of the genre.