The Eulogy of The Novelist: What comes after the death of the author
Can we ever really know our favourite authors? Art by Ellie Stephenson
May 9, 2021
If, as Joan Didion said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” then we tell the stories of others in order to better know how to die. How to leave a legacy.
The biography is one such device. Last month, publisher W. W. Norton permanently halted distribution of Blake Bailey’s recent biography of American novelist Philip Roth after allegations surfaced that Bailey had groomed, harassed, and raped multiple women. It’s hard not to relate these revelations to one of the main criticisms from which his biography suffered – that he was uncritical of Roth’s misogyny, claims of which soured and followed Roth for much of his career. In fact, Ross Miller’s very frankness about Roth’s misogyny led Roth to end an agreement with Miller to initially write his biography. But any poetic justice in
Book review: Keats by Lucasta Miller theweek.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theweek.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Keats lives on His radical depictions of desire and oblivion changed the course of English poetry – and, 200 years after his death, they disarm us still. As Jonathan Bate observes, the American critic Edmund Wilson “never allowed his friendship to dull his critical intelligence”. He had been close to F Scott Fitzgerald as a student, but, writing in 1924 about Fitzgerald’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise, he was unforgiving towards what he saw as its central weaknesses – a lack of energy and coherence, which he attributed to the intertwining malign influences of Compton Mackenzie and John Keats. Mackenzie, whose stock as a novelist was still high in the 1920s, had himself attributed features of his florid literary style to Keats’s example; but Fitzgerald had certainly gone direct to the source as well.
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