Nico Walker is an Iraq veteran, heroin addict, bank robber, and author of the semi-autobiographical novel Cherry, published last month. Ilana Kaplan writes about why he decided to write the novel and what it was like to edit it from prison.
Joyce Maynard writes about her relationship with J. D. Salinger—when he was 53 and she 18—and the response to her 1998 book on the relationship: “The publication of At Home in the World, and my subsequent choice to sell Salinger’s letters to me at auction—over 38 pages of what were definitely not love letters but were without question valuable literary documents—inspired an avalanche of disdain and outrage. (The letters were purchased by a wealthy man who said he would return them to Salinger.) That season, at a rare literary event to which I had been invited, an entire row of writers I respected greatly rose from their seats en masse and, as I took the stage, departed the room. I like to think that had they stayed and listened to me that day, they might have questioned their assumptions. For 20 years, I’ve lived with the consequences of having told that forbidden story, and though I’ve since published nine novels and another memoir, none of which involves Salinger, few reviews of any book I write fail to mention that when I was 18 I slept with a great writer, and, more significantly, that I later committed the unpardonable offense of telling that story, or, as it is frequently stated, of writing a ‘tell-all’ — language that aligns me with tabloid personalities.”
Was the director Hal Ashby a genius? A new documentary “makes a vigorous but somewhat unconvincing case for Ashby’s importance,” writes Kyle Smith.
The case for wasting time: “The passing of Labor Day heralds the unofficial end of another American summer, a season celebrated as a time to embrace the joy of doing less. But in The Art of the Wasted Day, a new book that got a good bit of attention this summer from readers and critics alike, author Patricia Hampl argues that doing less is an ideal we should embrace throughout the year.”
Ann Marlowe visits “one of Italy’s overlooked gems,” the Pilotta museum complex.
Burt Reynolds has died. He was 82.
Weekend podcast: Listen to an episode of “The World in Words” on the poet Ira Lightman, who is also a poetry plagiarism detective.
Essay of the Day:
In Lapham’s Quarterly, Matthew Sherrill tells the story of John Quincy Adams’s forgotten epic poem and its critics. “He is not content to go down to posterity simply as a great man,” wrote one critic. “He wishes to be regarded as a universal genius”:
“In February 1831, some two years after suffering a humiliating defeat in his presidential reelection bid, and two weeks before assuming office as a freshly minted Massachusetts congressman, John Quincy Adams sat down to write an epic. ‘I began this morning a Poem,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘the conception of which is amusing but requiring more continuity of purpose, more poetical imagination, and more command of language and power of harmony than belongs to me.’ Despite his professed sense of inadequacy—a sense he carried through all his writerly endeavors—Adams wholly committed himself to the project. He sometimes composed in the early hours of the morning before getting out of bed or muttered spontaneous verse to himself on long walks around Washington, DC’s Capitol Square, which he would later transcribe before dinner. The following year, Adams would publish the result of his ramblings: Dermot Mac Morrough, or, the Conquest of Ireland, a mock-historical epic of 266 ottava rima stanzas, in four cantos.
“When Adams conceived of the work, he was still smarting over Andrew Jackson’s 1828 victory. To Adams and his supporters, the unscrupulous Jackson heralded a dangerously chaotic set of norms in American politics. The latter’s ostensible disrespect for legal precedent, his cult of personality, and lack of political and moral vision (as well as his penchant for lethal dueling) could not have run further afoul of the high-minded anti-factionalism to which Adams laid rhetorical claim in his political career. Jackson, meanwhile, wielding unprecedented amounts of campaign cash, had driven his supporters into a frenzy over the patrician Adams’ record, charging him, among other anti-American heresies, with monarchism, European-style decadence, Masonry (false, and pointedly ignoring the fact that Jackson actually was a mason), federal overreach, and perhaps most fearfully, the specter of abolitionism. Although the ex-president had presided over a peaceful, economically stable, and bureaucratically well-managed four-year term, he had accomplished little of substance, and was walloped by the ex-general by an electoral-vote margin of 178-83. Resigned, a defeated Adams spent the final weeks of his presidency tending quietly to vegetables, fruit trees, and herbs in the White House garden.
“Adams now turned to poetry, a source of both amusement and sustenance throughout his life and career. His earlier efforts had run the formal gamut, including a youthful Romantic paean to the cliffs of Dover, a love poem to an idealized, indifferent beloved, satirical sketches of the young society ladies of Massachusetts, a playful account of his maid’s unexpected pregnancy (based on a true story, and concluding happily with a baptism and marriage), even an ode to a particularly revealing dress, which his wife Louisa characterized as ‘the sauciest lines I ever perused.’ But despite his occasional (and comparatively modest) forays into prurience, Adams was most at home in a didactic, religious mode. The better part of his poetic output consists of short, lyrical expressions of spiritual devotion—the pious hymnals that would eventually be collected in the posthumous Poems of Religion and Society, the anthology upon which Adams’ modest nineteenth-century reputation would rest. Adams’ best-known poem at that time was 1841’s ‘The Wants of Man,’ a measured consideration of heavenly and earthly pleasures. (‘My last great Want—absorbing all— / Is, when beneath the sod, / And summoned to my final call, / The Mercy of my God.’) It would later appear in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1874 edited anthology Parnassus alongside Wordsworth, Milton, and Tennyson, in a particularly botched attempt at forecasting the canon.
“Dermot was a much more ambitious project, and in some sense an inevitable one. Adams had spent much of his life haunted by a sense of missed vocational opportunity, having foregone a life of literary seclusion for a duty-bound career in the public sphere. ‘Could I have chosen my own Genius and Condition I should have made myself a great Poet,’ he noted in his diary in 1816. ‘As it is, I have wasted much of my life in writing verses; spell-bound in the circle of mediocrity.’ Adams’ regretful melancholia, sedulously chronicled in his diary throughout his life, was never unaccompanied by frequently brutal assessments of his own poetic talents, the nagging sense that, free from public obligations, a poetic career would have been doomed to failure regardless. Dermot provided Adams an opportunity to evaluate his own self-estimation, to see, in the wake of an ineffectual presidency, if he might more adequately serve the nation through instructive verse.”
Photos: Croatia
Poem: Susan Delaney Spear, “Anthology”
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