Magic Hours Read Online Free Page B

many poets’ work sits moldering in New England attic trunks, no one having lobbied on its behalf? What of a novel like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a beautifully searing reproach to federal treatment of Native Americans? Ramona actively changed American history, something neither Melville, Whitman, nor Dickinson’s work can claim. Ramona was praised when it first appeared, not the least by Jackson’s friend Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “Pity me, I have finished Ramona.” Ramona lives on, of course, much in the way of Moby-Dick before 1917—a minor classic attended by the tepid enthusiasm of a few. We may laugh at Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s antique taste today, but that taste once belonged to everyone. Is it impossible to imagine what unpredictable events might allow us a shocked recognition of that taste again?
    Â 
    Â 
    For many months after Desperate Characters reappeared, writer friends, agents, and strangers sent to me numerous works of fiction and poetry they maintained never met with proper acclaim. The books came in, one after another, accompanied by nth-generation Xeroxes of effulgent reviews from Publishers Weekly and stamped with enthusiastic blurbs from James Baldwin, Stanley Elkin, and
Rita Mae Brown. Brokenhearted postscripts revealed the miserable delicacy of our literary machinery: “Although it sold well, the publisher let it go out of print....” “The Times review came out eleven months after its publication....” “There was no paperback sale....” I soon felt as though I were deep in the peaty bowels of some awful literary purgatory, where hundreds of books are lashed with their own obscurity, many no worse than those considered—in an irritating oxymoron—“contemporary classics.” I floated one or two of these projects before Norton’s board, but failed to convince anyone of the fiduciary soundness of further revivals. It did not auger well that Graywolf Press’s ambitious Rediscovery series, which republished, among other books, Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall , one of the greatest American novels I have ever read, had been recently discontinued.
    With all this in mind, I don’t know if I could have read a less comforting book than Joseph Blotner’s landmark biography Faulkner. Even Faulkner was forced to sneak past checkpoints into demilitarized literary immortality. Here again, in this century, were all the hard-luck accouterments of ill-starred nineteenth-century scriveners. With every book but Sanctuary out of print, Faulkner was living in Hollywood, drinking too much, reduced to reworking screenplays for films like The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse. (Of course, he also scripted To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep .) While many writers and critics revered him, Faulkner’s popular status was so obscure that Faulkner was asked by the actor Clark Gable who Faulkner felt were the best living writers. Faulkner replied, “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself.” A surprised Gable asked Faulkner if he wrote fiction. “Yes, Mr. Gable,” Faulkner said. “What do you do?”
    In 1944, a despondent Faulkner came across a letter that had lain unopened in his desk for months. Faulkner opened his mail only when he recognized the return address, or to scavenge any
return postage stamps. The three-month-old letter, torn open on a whim, was from the young critic Malcolm Cowley, who wanted to write an essay on Faulkner that would “redress the balance” between his worth and reputation. Faulkner gave Cowley his delighted blessing, but the essay was rejected several times by editors who maintained that Faulkner was an unsalable commodity. It finally appeared in the New York Times Book Review , which for once found itself on the right side of history. Soon after that, Viking Press contracted Cowley to edit a collection of Faulkner’s work for