Media Consumption 23 January 2924

The Vessel of Wrath (story) by W Somerset Maugham. (kindle and Audible audiobook).

This is a well-plotted and not uninteresting story. However, as a person who pays close attention to language and the quality of sentences -- a necessary but not sufficient condition of literary fiction? -- I found little worth quoting. Here are two sections that mildly impressed me:

She was several inches taller than he. He thought her very unattractive. She reminded him strangely of wet linen hung on a clothes-line to dry.

... Except for the cholera we should never have learnt to know one another. I have never seen the hand of God more plainly manifest."

     The Controleur could not but think that it was rather a clumsy device to bring those two together that necessitated the death of six hundred persons, but not being versed in the ways of omnipotence he made no remark.

This story also contains a rather subtle, but, nevertheless, extant, idea that the English are superior to the indigenous people of the South Pacific.

If you want to read your first Maugham story, I would say it would be better to start with The Letter.

Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson. (kindle).

I first heard about this book when I bought a copy of Time magazine in late December 1989 to see what they considered the best of the 80s. Simpson was John Berryman's first wife and, in this book, she describes what made Barrymore so exciting as a poet and writer. We also meet his writer companions, including Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Dylan Thomas, among others.

Simpson describes her memories of these people before their lives were wrecked by alcohol and mental illness. We see them in their youth when they were genuinely excited about language and writing and life itself.

Berryman gained a reputation later as, in the words of Saul Bellow, "drew his words out of his vital organs, out of his very skin." By far, his best work are his nearly 400 dream songs; the reading of which my undergraduate poetry professor, Jack Leax, compared to Augustine's Confessions.

In this passage from Simpson's book we learn the story of how John discovered the word parnel. (A priest's mistress)

And we see how, years later, Berryman worked the word into his 31st dream song.