Subject
Imaginary novelists (fwd)
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From: didier.machu@univ-pau.fr
The recent messages about imaginary artists in Nabokov's novels and
others remind me of a piece by Robert Irwin, formerly a lecturer in
medieval history at St Andrews University and the author of four novels. It
is entitled "Unreadable Books: Fictional Landmarks in Twentieth-Century
British Writing" and begins:
"British fiction in the twentieth century resembles a large
Victorian house-as it appears in a recurrent nightmare. It has corridors
which seem endless and which do indeed go nowhere . . . There is a bad
smell from the drains. Some of the inhabitants of this house are busily
engaged in trying to strip the lead from the roof, . . . It is the job of
the critic to bring some order to this turbulent menage.
By common consent Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain, X. Trapnel,
Gwynn Barry and, perhaps Jude Mason have been the dominant figures in
British novel-writing in this century . . ."
The author goes on to analyse, not quite in V's terms, such novels
as Success and The Doubtful Asphodel, paying homage to Goodman's remarkable
biography, and eventually passes on to some transatlantic novelists: Bech,
Zuckerman, or Van Veen who has claims to be regarded as the father of
sci-fi. Some fictitious novelists are found worthy of a passing mention:
Powell, Durrell, Borges, Nabokov, Updike, among other characters.
The piece was included in New Writing 6 - An Anthology Ed. by A.S.
Byatt & P. Porter. Vintage U.K., 1997.
Didier Machu
The recent messages about imaginary artists in Nabokov's novels and
others remind me of a piece by Robert Irwin, formerly a lecturer in
medieval history at St Andrews University and the author of four novels. It
is entitled "Unreadable Books: Fictional Landmarks in Twentieth-Century
British Writing" and begins:
"British fiction in the twentieth century resembles a large
Victorian house-as it appears in a recurrent nightmare. It has corridors
which seem endless and which do indeed go nowhere . . . There is a bad
smell from the drains. Some of the inhabitants of this house are busily
engaged in trying to strip the lead from the roof, . . . It is the job of
the critic to bring some order to this turbulent menage.
By common consent Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain, X. Trapnel,
Gwynn Barry and, perhaps Jude Mason have been the dominant figures in
British novel-writing in this century . . ."
The author goes on to analyse, not quite in V's terms, such novels
as Success and The Doubtful Asphodel, paying homage to Goodman's remarkable
biography, and eventually passes on to some transatlantic novelists: Bech,
Zuckerman, or Van Veen who has claims to be regarded as the father of
sci-fi. Some fictitious novelists are found worthy of a passing mention:
Powell, Durrell, Borges, Nabokov, Updike, among other characters.
The piece was included in New Writing 6 - An Anthology Ed. by A.S.
Byatt & P. Porter. Vintage U.K., 1997.
Didier Machu