"Trust in the art, not in the artist."
The latest issue of Harper's Magazine (the April 2012 issue: Vol. 324, No. 1943) hit my mailbox yesterday, and, as usual, the first articles I turned to were the book reviews: Larry McMurtry's "New Books" column, which he inherited from Zadie Smith (White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty), and which serves as a continual reproach that I've not read even one of his books yet (The Berrybender Narratives! The Berrybender Narratives!), but also the book review essays.
(McMurtry's column this time out covered a new collection of essays by William Gass -- another author I've yet to read but, happily, one that I don't feel too guilty about -- Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts; a collection of Roland Barthes's essays, Mythologies [McMurty never gives Barthes's first name; I've never read Barthes and I've no guilt whatsoever about that fact]; and a Library of America omnibus of Barbara W. Tuchman's two fantastic popular histories about the years immediately before World War I and the first month of same, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower [chronologically speaking, they're collected in reverse order: The Proud Tower covers major events in Europe and the U.S. from the 1890s to the early 1910s, while the more famous The Guns of August scrutinizes the disastrous first month of The Great War]. The completist geek in me cavils at the omission of The Zimmerman Telegram, but never mind: the omnibus is quite the door-stopper as-is.)
Of the two book review essays in the April edition of Harper's, one caught my eye: Will Frears's consideration ("The Long Goodbye: James Ellroy tries to let go") of four works by James Ellroy: Clandestine (1982), The Black Dahlia (1987), My Dark Places (1996), and The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2010).
Due to the works considered -- only the first two titles are novels -- the piece is heavily skewed towards the biographical, rather than a broad overview of Ellroy's corpus. (Although, based on Frears's evaluation of Clandestine, I'd trust him to write such an overview: "If you picked [Clandestine] up for a flight, you'd be delighted, but it's not what we mean when we talk about Ellroy" [p. 67]. I wouldn't use as strong a word as "delighted," but let it pass.)
As Frears makes clear early in his essay, anything that diverts the reader from Ellroy's fiction and focuses it on the man himself is not to be courted or desired. I've read enough interviews with and autobiographical pieces by Ellroy (Destination: Morgue! contains enough of them to give a sense of whether one might actually like reading more "Ellroy on Ellroy") over the years to come to the realization that the man is a vainglorious, churlish, hyper-judgmental SOB, and happy is the reader who is distanced from him by his body of work.
Frears shows that The Hilliker Curse (Hilliker is the maiden name of Ellroy's mother, whose murder in 1958 remains unsolved, despite the considerable effort and money that Ellroy spent at the height of his career to solve it, documented in My Dark Places) is the most egregious, and unfortunate, memoir that Ellroy has published to date: while he cites an especially scurrilous and funny attack by Ellroy's father on a Hollywood celebrity ("'..Mickey Rooney would fuck a woodpile on the off-chance a snake might be inside'"; p. 68), there are far more examples of Ellroy's absurdly empyrean self-regard to warn away all but the most starry-eyed reader. This paragraph did it for me:
"Ellroy has been called a misogynist time and again, and it's a charge he absolutely refutes: 'I am the son of a murdered woman -- anybody who'd call my books misogynistic is, frankly, out of their fucking mind.' He's not entirely wrong. It's not that he dislikes women; he just can't seem to see them outside the context of his relationship to them. Those who aren't like him or who resist him are deficient: any woman who likes any music that isn't Beethoven is jejune; other women's husbands must be gay. If a woman shows an interest in an activity other than sex with him, he assumes she is a 'coal burner,' interested only in well-endowed black men."
-- p. 69
Ellroy on women is like a post-modern tweaking of Henry Miller on women: Ellroy may eschew Miller's highfalutin and windy verbiage, but he's just as full of shit.
(McMurtry's column this time out covered a new collection of essays by William Gass -- another author I've yet to read but, happily, one that I don't feel too guilty about -- Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts; a collection of Roland Barthes's essays, Mythologies [McMurty never gives Barthes's first name; I've never read Barthes and I've no guilt whatsoever about that fact]; and a Library of America omnibus of Barbara W. Tuchman's two fantastic popular histories about the years immediately before World War I and the first month of same, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower [chronologically speaking, they're collected in reverse order: The Proud Tower covers major events in Europe and the U.S. from the 1890s to the early 1910s, while the more famous The Guns of August scrutinizes the disastrous first month of The Great War]. The completist geek in me cavils at the omission of The Zimmerman Telegram, but never mind: the omnibus is quite the door-stopper as-is.)
Of the two book review essays in the April edition of Harper's, one caught my eye: Will Frears's consideration ("The Long Goodbye: James Ellroy tries to let go") of four works by James Ellroy: Clandestine (1982), The Black Dahlia (1987), My Dark Places (1996), and The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women (2010).
Due to the works considered -- only the first two titles are novels -- the piece is heavily skewed towards the biographical, rather than a broad overview of Ellroy's corpus. (Although, based on Frears's evaluation of Clandestine, I'd trust him to write such an overview: "If you picked [Clandestine] up for a flight, you'd be delighted, but it's not what we mean when we talk about Ellroy" [p. 67]. I wouldn't use as strong a word as "delighted," but let it pass.)
As Frears makes clear early in his essay, anything that diverts the reader from Ellroy's fiction and focuses it on the man himself is not to be courted or desired. I've read enough interviews with and autobiographical pieces by Ellroy (Destination: Morgue! contains enough of them to give a sense of whether one might actually like reading more "Ellroy on Ellroy") over the years to come to the realization that the man is a vainglorious, churlish, hyper-judgmental SOB, and happy is the reader who is distanced from him by his body of work.
Frears shows that The Hilliker Curse (Hilliker is the maiden name of Ellroy's mother, whose murder in 1958 remains unsolved, despite the considerable effort and money that Ellroy spent at the height of his career to solve it, documented in My Dark Places) is the most egregious, and unfortunate, memoir that Ellroy has published to date: while he cites an especially scurrilous and funny attack by Ellroy's father on a Hollywood celebrity ("'..Mickey Rooney would fuck a woodpile on the off-chance a snake might be inside'"; p. 68), there are far more examples of Ellroy's absurdly empyrean self-regard to warn away all but the most starry-eyed reader. This paragraph did it for me:
"Ellroy has been called a misogynist time and again, and it's a charge he absolutely refutes: 'I am the son of a murdered woman -- anybody who'd call my books misogynistic is, frankly, out of their fucking mind.' He's not entirely wrong. It's not that he dislikes women; he just can't seem to see them outside the context of his relationship to them. Those who aren't like him or who resist him are deficient: any woman who likes any music that isn't Beethoven is jejune; other women's husbands must be gay. If a woman shows an interest in an activity other than sex with him, he assumes she is a 'coal burner,' interested only in well-endowed black men."
-- p. 69
Ellroy on women is like a post-modern tweaking of Henry Miller on women: Ellroy may eschew Miller's highfalutin and windy verbiage, but he's just as full of shit.